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
- Living APIs, and the Case for GraphQL
Why it makes sense to model APIs as graphs, and what GraphQL can do for us to help with discovery, batch operations, and gradual enhancement.
- Scaling a High-traffic Rate Limiting Stack With Redis Cluster
Flattening a single very hot vertical Redis node into a horizontal Redis Cluster at Stripe.
- 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.
Older articles are available here.
Fragments
- Reflections on Rust, and the sand castle metaphor
Some personal progress with Rust.
- 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.
Older fragments are available here.
