Series
Curated engineering reading paths
Virtual series that group existing posts into practical paths without changing individual article frontmatter.
AI Cost Engineering
AI developer tools are no longer productivity add-ons. They are usage-based infrastructure with real OPEX profiles. This series applies cloud cost engineering methods to the AI developer tooling layer: token budget design, context window optimization, model tiering, observability pipelines, governance runbooks, and procurement due diligence.
AI EngineeringAI Engineering Operating Model
How to run AI-assisted engineering as a governed operating model: agent loops, context, evals, permissions, control planes, and review boundaries.
DatabasesDatabase Reliability Playbook
Operational workflows for diagnosing, recovering, and preventing database incidents across slow queries, backups, replication, autovacuum, migrations, and capacity pressure.
DatabasesScaling Writes: How Databases Outgrow the Single Writer
Read replicas add query capacity but never divide write ownership. This series works through the single-writer ceiling and the architectures that actually distribute commits — Citus, Aurora Limitless, Aurora DSQL, sharded MySQL, and domain decomposition — with the operational cost of each stated explicitly.
DatabasesDatabase Observability Playbook
A complete guide to monitoring, alerting, and capacity planning for Postgres, MySQL, Cassandra, and MongoDB at scale.
DatabasesFrom Metrics to Root Cause: LLM-Assisted Database Performance Troubleshooting in the Cloud
A 2026 field guide to collecting database evidence deterministically, detecting anomalies statistically, using LLMs to develop testable root-cause hypotheses, and keeping production changes under human control.
AI EngineeringObservability 2024–2026
Three years of production observability: from building the first database dashboard, through AI-assisted incident triage, to autonomous SRE agents that observe themselves.
Cloud & PlatformCloud Platform Architecture
Reference architectures and operating boundaries for cloud platforms, managed databases, CI/CD, Terraform, Kubernetes, GitOps, and multi-region systems.
DatabasesVector Search Systems
Retrieval architecture across pgvector, hybrid search, embeddings, GPU databases, and the operational boundaries around AI database access.
System DesignSystem Design for Database Engineers
System design notes centered on data boundaries, failure modes, consistency, queues, caches, backpressure, capacity, and database-backed product workflows.
FundamentalsArchitecture Review Checklists
Review prompts and decision frameworks for architecture, database, security, cloud, automation, and AI access decisions before they become production risk.
Cloud & PlatformCloud Database Cost Engineering
Database and data-platform cost reduction across Azure, AWS, GCP, and OCI. From DWU right-sizing to Azure Hybrid Benefit and Oracle BYOL.