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A curated reading path through the site

This blog has 300+ posts on deep technical architecture. Select your role below to get a sequenced reading path — not just links, but an order that builds each concept on the previous one.

For the DBA & Database Engineer

Deep dives into PostgreSQL and MySQL internals, incident runbooks, and zero-downtime migrations. Read in this order.

  1. MVCC Explained Like a Database Engineer — how readers and writers avoid blocking each other
  2. WAL Explained for Database Engineers — the foundation behind crash recovery and replication
  3. PostgreSQL Autovacuum: What Every Engineer Should Know — why it's a capacity problem, not a maintenance task
  4. PostgreSQL Slow Query Triage Workflow — from symptom to fix
  5. Database Connection Pooling: Why Apps Kill Databases — the failure mode teams discover too late
  6. PostgreSQL Connection Storm Runbook — what to do when it's already on fire
  7. Schema Deployment Risk Checklist — the 12 checks before any live migration
  8. Database Changes in CI/CD — migrations, backfills, and rollback paths
  9. Database Alert Design — thresholds that fire on saturation, not noise
  10. Database Reliability Playbook (full series)
  11. Oracle to PostgreSQL ROI Calculator

For the Cloud & Platform Engineer

Terraform, GitOps, CI/CD, multi-region systems, and cloud provider decisions. Read in this order.

  1. Terraform State Is a Production Dependency — state deserves the same controls as your database
  2. Terraform Plan Review: What Senior Engineers Look For — the eleven checks beginners miss
  3. Terraform Drift Triage Workflow — detect, classify, reconcile, prevent
  4. Aurora vs RDS: The Operational Difference Engineers Actually Feel — what changes at 03:00
  5. Multi-Region Architecture: Latency, Consistency, and Blast Radius
  6. AWS vs Azure vs GCP vs OCI: Database Decision Framework
  7. Black Friday Database Readiness — capacity checks before peak traffic
  8. Cloud Platform Architecture (full series)
  9. Cloud Architecture Review Checklist

For the AI Engineering Reader

Safely running agents, evals, RAG architectures, database guardrails, and MCP. Read in this order.

  1. Agent Loop Anatomy for DB & Cloud Engineers — how agents plan, call tools, and observe results
  2. Evals Are the New Unit Tests for Agents — why test coverage is not enough
  3. The Agent Should Not Have Your App Credentials — database-enforced read-only access
  4. Natural Language SQL Agents Need Database Guardrails — role design, SQL parsing, and audit records
  5. Runtime Boundaries for Agentic App Builders — what agents can read, write, call, and spend
  6. Agent Autonomy Ladder — when to auto-approve vs require human confirmation
  7. Tool Search vs Loading Every MCP Tool — token-efficient tool selection at runtime
  8. AI Engineering Operating Model (full series)
  9. Vector Search Systems (series)

For the Manager & Architect

Decision frameworks, operating models, risk reviews, and the calls that are hard to reverse. Read in this order.

  1. System Design Starts With Failure Modes — draw the failure path before the happy path
  2. Queues vs Streams: The Decision Engineers Keep Reversing — the one question that determines which is right
  3. Idempotency Keys: The Small Table That Saves Distributed Systems
  4. AWS vs Azure vs GCP vs OCI: Database Decision Framework
  5. System Design Review Checklist for Senior Engineers
  6. Product Catalog Modeling Decisions — relational, document, search, or all three
  7. Architecture Review Checklists (full series)
  8. Database Modernization Tools

For the New Reader

The absolute fundamentals, ordered as a concept ladder. Each one builds on the previous. Read in this order.

  1. System Design Starts With Failure Modes — the mental model behind everything else on this site
  2. MVCC Explained Like a Database Engineer
  3. WAL Explained for Database Engineers
  4. Queues vs Streams: The Decision Engineers Keep Reversing
  5. Idempotency Keys: The Small Table That Saves Distributed Systems
  6. Caches Do Not Remove Database Load — unless you design the miss path
  7. System Design for Database Engineers (full series)
  8. Best Of — the highest-signal posts across all topics
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