system-design – Page 2 – Türker Yıldırım

The second host, and the failover we finally built

Deep diveMarch 27, 202614 min read

Seven years on one host, and a business requirement that finally arrived. A recovery time that assumes the host comes back.

The decision record that was cited against its author

NoteMarch 18, 20261 min read

A proposal to split a service, met with a record written by the proposer in 2024 explaining why not to. Being argued with by your own record from…

Ten years of a WordPress site, and what is left of the theme

Deep diveMarch 3, 202610 min read

A theme that was 61 PHP templates in 2023 and is six block templates and a stylesheet. An audit rather than a problem.

Reading a protocol specification rather than a client library

NoteFebruary 24, 20262 min read

An hour with a specification, against a week of inferring behaviour from a library’s source. A client library encodes one interpretation of a specification and the parts it…

The integration that outlived the integrator

Deep diveFebruary 24, 202610 min read

A supplier acquired and shut down, and an endpoint returning 200 with an empty body for eleven weeks.

A schema change on a table nobody can lock

Deep diveJanuary 27, 202610 min read

A column type change on a table taking four hundred writes a second, and an ALTER that estimates four hours.

Publishing a shared lint config for a team

Deep diveJanuary 22, 202610 min read

turkerdev/kbox-eslint-rules, and four repositories with four nearly identical configs that disagreed on eleven rules.

A post-incident note written by somebody who slept through it

NoteJanuary 15, 20262 min read

An incident resolved automatically overnight, written up from the timeline rather than from memory. Writing it up from logs rather than from experience produced a better note than…

An alert into a channel nobody reads at 04:00

NoteJanuary 5, 20262 min read

An alert that fired correctly at four in the morning, into a channel that is read at eight. An alert that is correct, correctly routed and unread for…

A plugin with no admin screen

Deep diveDecember 18, 202510 min read

A plugin whose entire configuration is a constant and a filter, on a site whose deployment is a pipeline.