L1 Field Note
Databases SQL Server to PostgreSQL Migration Cost Defense Checklist
A pragmatic checklist to defend the business case for migrating away from Microsoft SQL Server.
Series / Fundamentals
Architecture Review Checklists
Review prompts and decision frameworks for architecture, database, security, cloud, automation, and AI access decisions before they become production risk.
31 posts Fundamentals
Who This Is For
Tech leads and architects running design reviews or evaluating their own systems for production readiness. Each post is a reusable checklist, not a conceptual overview.
What You Will Be Able to Do
- Run a database architecture review that catches consistency and locking assumptions before launch
- Evaluate a migration plan for rollback coverage and downtime risk
- Review automation scripts for permission scope, audit trail, and failure handling
- Ask the right questions about AI access boundaries before granting write permissions to an agent
Prerequisites
You've shipped systems to production and have opinions about what went wrong. These checklists assume you can evaluate the answers, not just ask the questions.
Start Here
All Posts
L1 Field Note
Databases SQL Server to PostgreSQL Migration Cost Defense Checklist
A pragmatic checklist to defend the business case for migrating away from Microsoft SQL Server.
L3 Reference Guide
Databases Schema Deployment Risk Checklist
Assessing lock type, table size, reversibility, and rollback plan before every schema migration — a structured checklist for zero-downtime deployments.
L3 Reference Guide
Databases Index Debt Review: How to Find Bad, Missing, and Duplicate Indexes
A SQL-driven audit workflow for identifying unused, duplicate, bloated, and missing indexes in PostgreSQL before they drain write performance and storage.
L2 Deep Dive
Databases MongoDB Version Upgrade Risk Review
A systematic runbook for assessing MongoDB version upgrade risk — FCV, driver compatibility, deprecated operators, and rollback paths before any production cutover.
L1 Field Note
AI Engineering Database Security Review for AI Access
Granting an autonomous AI agent access to your database breaks every assumption of traditional RBAC. How to secure databases against unpredictable, unbounded AI queries.
L3 Reference Guide
Databases Cloud Architecture Review Checklist for Database-Backed Applications
Review checklist for database-backed cloud applications: connection saturation, migration locking, retry amplification, and region dependency failures.
L3 Reference Guide
Databases MongoDB Queryable Encryption Architecture Review
A pre-go-live architecture review for MongoDB Queryable Encryption — key management, field classification, query type constraints, driver requirements, and key rotation.
L1 Field Note
AI Engineering Agent-to-Agent Review Loops
A practical review pattern where one agent creates a change and specialized agents review risk, rollback, security, and observability.
L2 Deep Dive
Cloud & Platform Automation Readiness Review: Inputs, State, Permissions, Rollback, and Audit
A five-question checklist before running automation in production: are inputs bounded, is state understood, are permissions scoped, is rollback credible, and is the audit trail durable enough to reconstruct what happened.
L2 Deep Dive
Cloud & Platform Automation Incident Review: When the Tool Worked and the System Failed
The hardest automation incidents are not broken tools — they happen when every tool executes exactly as asked while the surrounding system loses the ability to evaluate whether that action is still safe.
L2 Deep Dive
Cloud & Platform Terraform Plan Review: What Senior Engineers Look For
Terraform plan review is not a syntax check — it is the last cheap place to catch a production architecture mistake before an API turns intent into infrastructure. What senior engineers actually look for in a plan output.
L2 Deep Dive
Cloud & Platform Terraform Module Design Checklist for Database Infrastructure
Database Terraform modules fail when they hide operational decisions behind convenient defaults — a checklist covering parameter groups, backup policies, encryption, and the boundaries that must never be automated away.
L2 Deep Dive
System Design System Design Review Checklist for Senior Engineers
Most system designs fail for reasons visible at review time: overloaded dependencies, ambiguous ownership, unsafe retries, unbounded queues, and missing rollback paths — a checklist senior engineers use to surface those risks early.
L2 Deep Dive
Cloud & Platform Policy as Code for Terraform: OPA, Sentinel, Checkov, and Human Review
Terraform review fails when humans rediscover the same constraints in every PR — how OPA, Sentinel, and Checkov encode policy gates that catch public storage buckets, unencrypted databases, and missing tags at plan time.
L2 Deep Dive
System Design Azure Database Reliability Review: Failover Groups, Backups, and Geo-Replication
Azure database recovery beyond 'we have backups': failover group cutover, geo-replication lag, and backup restore testing as the real reliability floor.
L2 Deep Dive
Cloud & Platform GCP Database Cost Review: Cloud SQL, Spanner, Bigtable, Memorystore, and BigQuery
Cloud SQL, Spanner, Bigtable, Memorystore, and BigQuery each bill differently — cost overruns trace to applying the wrong model to the wrong workload.
L2 Deep Dive
System Design OCI Disaster Recovery Review: Regions, ADs, Backups, Data Guard, and GoldenGate
OCI disaster recovery gaps that emerge when teams rely on regional failover alone, and how Data Guard and GoldenGate address the database replication tier.
L2 Deep Dive
System Design Black Friday Database Readiness: Hot Keys, Connection Pools, Cache Misses, and Queue Depth
Hot key contention, connection pool exhaustion, and cache miss bursts each hit local thresholds before aggregate dashboards show anything alarming.
L2 Deep Dive
AI Engineering The Harness Around the Agent: How Stripe Runs 1,000 Unattended Code Reviews per Week
Stripe's Minions system runs over a thousand AI code reviews weekly using a fork of an open-source agent. The reliability comes from the deterministic pipeline around it, not the model inside.
L3 Reference Guide
Cloud & Platform pgcrypto vs KMS vs HSM: Decision Framework
Engineers often over-rotate to Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) for non-regulatory workloads or under-rotate to database extensions. How to map data classification to the right cryptographic tier.
L2 Deep Dive
Cloud & Platform Terraform in CI/CD: Plan, Review, Apply, Lock, and Rollback Boundaries
Terraform in CI/CD requires different gates than application deployments: plan review thresholds, apply lock design, environment promotion, and a rollback boundary that actually works when state diverges.
L3 Reference Guide
System Design Event-Driven Architecture Review: Schema Evolution, Ordering, Replay, and Dead Letters
The four failure boundaries in event-driven systems: schema evolution contracts, ordering guarantees, consumer replay safety, and dead-letter queue handling.
L2 Deep Dive
System Design Service Decomposition Review: When a New Microservice Creates a Worse Database Problem
Splitting a service without relocating the database boundary creates distributed coordination overhead worse than the monolith the split was meant to fix.
L3 Reference Guide
Cloud & Platform AWS vs Azure vs GCP vs OCI for Database-Backed Systems: Decision Framework
How to choose between AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI for database-backed systems by matching managed database failure behavior to your system's dominant recovery requirement.
L2 Deep Dive
System Design The Staff Engineer's System Design Review: Questions That Expose Real Risk
Review questions a staff engineer asks to surface cascade failures, missing fallbacks, state boundaries, and load assumptions that design docs bury.
L3 Reference Guide
AI Engineering GitHub Year in Review: 2024 — What Open Source Changed in the Engineering Stack
Nine breakout repositories across three themes — agents that operated computers, RAG that grew a graph spine, and databases that finally spoke natively to LLMs — define what actually shifted in the engineering stack in 2024.
L2 Deep Dive
AI Engineering AI Agents in Platform Automation: Useful Assistant or Unreviewed Change Engine
When AI agents accelerate platform operations versus when they generate unreviewed changes — the permission boundary and audit design that separates useful from risky.
L1 Field Note
AI Engineering Outcome-Based Agent Evaluation vs Transcript Review
A field note on why agent evaluation should measure verified state changes instead of polished reasoning traces.
L1 Field Note
Databases Agentic Code Review for Database Repositories
Database repositories contain hidden rules human reviewers know: never add a blocking index at peak hours, never widen IAM without owner approval. Agent review surfaces these violations before merge — without displacing the human judgment that set the rules.
L3 Reference Guide
AI Engineering GitHub Year in Review: 2025 — What Open Source Changed in the Engineering Stack
Nine breakout repos across four themes — MCP protocol adoption, agent memory infrastructure, AI-native platform ops, and database automation — that eliminated the hand-built glue code between AI agents and production systems.
L1 Field Note
Databases How to Run a Database Cost & Reliability Review
A practitioner walkthrough of the review method: what to look at, in what order, how to quantify an opportunity honestly, and how to turn findings into a prioritized 30/60/90-day plan.