About
I'm @brandur. I'm an engineer at Stripe and previously at Heroku. I talk mostly about bad design. And a few words on APIs, Postgres, software safety and resilience, efficient human interfaces, urban design, running, and metal.
Articles
- Touring a Fast, Safe, and Complete(ish) Web Service in Rust
A detailed look at the frameworks, concurrency model, error handling, middleware constructs, and testing strategies of a web service written in Rust.
- Speed and Stability: Why Go is a Great Fit for Lambda
Why Go's stability and simple deployments is a good fit for a serverless environment.
- Scaling Postgres with Read Replicas & Using WAL to Counter Stale Reads
Scaling out operation with read replicas and avoiding the downside of stale reads by observing replication progress.
- Redis Streams and the Unified Log
Building a log-based architecture that's fast, efficient, and resilient on the new stream data structure in Redis.
- Implementing Stripe-like Idempotency Keys in Postgres
Building resilient services by identifying foreign state mutations and grouping local changes into restartable atomic phases so that every request can be driven to completion.
Older articles are available here.
Fragments
- The 500 test
Let's build more resilient services by paying attention to the edges.
- 100 days with Rust, or, a series of brick walls
A few thoughts on Rust after a few months of regular use.
- Mindfulness
On the importance of slowing down in the age of Slack and social media.
- Changing a universal constant: How 280-character tweets break an API
Even changing the length of a field is a backwards-incompatible change if it's deeply entrenched.
- The city that tried to buy itself
Thoughts on governments protecting tenants by buying buildings and raging against the law of supply and demand.
Older fragments are available here.
