L2 Deep Dive
AI Engineering Agent Productivity Depends on Context Throughput
AI coding agents work better when voice, clipboard, screenshots, and MCP tools reduce context friction.
L2 Deep Dive
AI Engineering AI Cost Incident Runbook: What to Do When Monthly Token Spend Suddenly Doubles
An operational playbook for triaging and containing LLM token spend spikes — from alert fire to root cause within 30 minutes.
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.
L1 Field Note
Engineering Fundamentals AI Cost Observability Dashboard: LangSmith vs Helicone
How to build an AI FinOps dashboard and choose between proxy-based and instrumentation-based observability.
L1 Field Note
Cloud & Platform BigQuery Cost Optimization: On-Demand vs Slot Commitments
How to stop runaway BigQuery costs by analyzing query scans, enforcing partitions, and moving to capacity-based pricing.
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.
L1 Field Note
Cloud & Platform Cloud Database Cost Engineering: How to Reduce Database, Data Warehouse, and Licensing Spend Across Azure, AWS, GCP, and OCI
A comprehensive framework for reigning in cloud database costs, focusing on licensing, right-sizing, and architectural tradeoffs.
L1 Field Note
Databases Database Runbooks as Agent Contracts
A reference operating model for turning human database runbooks into machine-usable agent contracts.
L1 Field Note
AI Engineering Agent Autonomy Ladder: Manual, Confirm, Auto-Approve, Supervised
A governance model for deciding which database and cloud agent actions require approval and which can run automatically.
L1 Field Note
AI Engineering Evals Are the New Unit Tests for Agents
Why database and cloud teams need agent eval harnesses that grade outcomes, not persuasive transcripts.
L2 Deep Dive
Cloud & Platform The 2026 Automation Roadmap for SRE, DevOps, and Database Teams
The 2026 automation priorities for SRE, DevOps, and database teams: what to finish, what to stop maintaining manually, and where agent workflows are actually production-ready.
L1 Field Note
Engineering Fundamentals Alert Fatigue Engineering: How to Build Fewer, Better, Actionable Alerts
A dashboard is not observability, and an alert without a specific action is just operational debt masquerading as monitoring.
L2 Deep Dive
Databases PostgreSQL 18 Replication Upgrade Opportunities
What changes in replication when upgrading from PostgreSQL 14–16 to PostgreSQL 18: parallel apply, pg_createsubscriber, and surfaced conflict visibility.
L2 Deep Dive
Databases PostgreSQL 18: Features DB Engineers Should Watch
PostgreSQL 18 introduces fundamental changes to the storage engine — asynchronous I/O, parallel logical apply, and improved conflict visibility are the changes operators need to understand before upgrading.
L3 Reference Guide
Databases Autovacuum Is a Capacity Problem, Not a Maintenance Task
PostgreSQL vacuum failures often start with blocked cleanup, table bloat, and weak lock observability during peak load.
L2 Deep Dive
Databases When Autovacuum Becomes a Backpressure Signal
PostgreSQL vacuum stalls are often symptoms of lock pressure, table bloat, and missing operational visibility.
L2 Deep Dive
AI Engineering Parallel AI Agents Need an Operating Model
Running many coding agents only works when git isolation, shared memory, permissions, hooks, and verification are designed as a system.
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.
L2 Deep Dive
AI Engineering Evaluate AI Agents by Completed Work, Not Token Price
Production AI agent selection should measure quality, retries, tokens, latency, and verification cost per completed task.
L2 Deep Dive
AI Engineering Remote Agents Need Deployment, Permissions, and Feedback Loops
Codex mobile turns local agents into remote workflows, but production value depends on deployment, access control, and observability.
L3 Reference Guide
AI Engineering Prompt Architecture Needs Load Boundaries
The default AI coding setup loads everything into one always-on instruction file. The production alternative is a layered architecture — project memory, task skills, commands, and MCP servers each with a defined load boundary — so context bloat and stale policy stop reaching the model on every turn.
L2 Deep Dive
Engineering Fundamentals Cost Observability: Build Dashboards That Show Waste Before Finance Finds It
How to expand monitoring beyond uptime by building dashboards that expose underutilized RDS instances, EBS io2 waste, and backup retention drift.
L2 Deep Dive
Databases PostgreSQL 16/17 Features That Matter to Operators
Which PostgreSQL 16 and 17 changes operators actually need to prepare for: logical replication improvements, vacuum visibility, connection limits, and monitoring additions that change on-call behavior.
L1 Field Note
Databases Prometheus + Grafana for Database Engineers: Open-Source Monitoring That Actually Works
How to position Prometheus and Grafana as the open-source baseline for teams that cannot send every byte of database telemetry to managed services.
L2 Deep Dive
Databases Datadog Database Monitoring: PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Aurora Setup
How to configure Datadog Database Monitoring for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Aurora — query samples, explain plans, wait event analysis, and the specific Agent settings that make the difference between metric collection and real observability.
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.
L2 Deep Dive
Databases Prometheus and Grafana for Database Monitoring: PostgreSQL and MySQL Setup
How to instrument PostgreSQL and MySQL with postgres_exporter and mysqld_exporter, configure Prometheus scrape jobs, and build Grafana panels that surface the metrics that matter — with working PromQL queries.
L2 Deep Dive
Databases Database Alert Design: Thresholds That Fire on Real Problems
How to set database alert thresholds that catch real failures without burning the team on autovacuum noise, checkpoint churn, and replication lag spikes — with specific values for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Aurora.
L2 Deep Dive
Databases MySQL and Aurora Monitoring: The Dashboard That Catches Problems Before Users Do
The seven MySQL and Aurora metric groups that matter for production operations — threads, replication lag, InnoDB buffer pool, slow queries, connections, locks, and disk — with exact SQL, CloudWatch metrics, and alert thresholds.
L2 Deep Dive
Databases PostgreSQL Monitoring: The Dashboard That Surfaces Problems Before Users Do
The eight PostgreSQL metric groups that matter for production operations — queries, connections, replication lag, autovacuum, locks, cache pressure, checkpoint behavior, and bloat — with exact SQL and alert thresholds.
L2 Deep Dive
AI Engineering Runtime Boundaries for Agentic App Builders
A hosted AI app generator fails when the mobile chat becomes the platform — API keys end up in binaries, execution state blurs with chat, and previews break without artifact handoff. The control-plane architecture that keeps these concerns separated.
L1 Field Note
Databases The Database Observability Baseline: What Every DBA Dashboard Must Show
Before you can adopt AI-assisted triage, your database dashboard needs a foundation built on saturation, locking, and lag metrics.
L2 Deep Dive
AI Engineering AI Agents Need a Control Plane, Not More Interfaces
Production AI agents work best when coding, files, tools, and knowledge workflows share one governed execution model.
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.
L2 Deep Dive
AI Engineering Use Coding Agents as a Toolchain, Not a Vendor Bet
A production-minded workflow for running Cursor and Aider together without locking engineering practice to one agent.
L1 Field Note
Databases MySQL 8.4 LTS: What DBAs Should Check Before Upgrade
MySQL 8.4 is the first long-term support release in the 8.x line — five breaking changes that require verification before any production upgrade.
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.
L2 Deep Dive
AI Engineering Durable State for Long-Running LLM Coding Sessions
A practical workflow for separating planning from execution, checkpointing progress in GitHub issues, and resuming multi-phase LLM implementation without context collapse.
L2 Deep Dive
AI Engineering From Chat to Agents: Designing Goal-to-Result Systems for Real Work
Chat is request-response; agents are task systems that plan, call tools, iterate, and stop when done. The minimum architecture — loop, tools, bounded memory, stopping conditions — required to make the transition from chat reliable.
L2 Deep Dive
AI Engineering Why Long-Running AI Coding Sessions Fail
A practical control plane for keeping AI coding sessions on track: separate planning from execution, validate deterministically, reset context aggressively, and isolate parallel work.
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
Cloud & Platform Internal Developer Platform Reference Architecture: Catalog, IaC, CI/CD, Policy, and Observability
Reference architecture for an IDP as a control plane—connecting service catalog, IaC, CI/CD pipelines, policy enforcement, and observability feedback.
L3 Reference Guide
Databases PostgreSQL Statistics Drift Workflow
When the query planner gets row estimates wrong, queries regress silently. This runbook diagnoses statistics drift and restores accurate plans.
L3 Reference Guide
Databases Logical Replication Failure Workflow
A diagnostic runbook for logical replication lag, apply worker failures, replication conflicts, and schema drift between publisher and subscriber.
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 Cloud Database Cost Triage: Storage, IOPS, CPU, Replicas
A structured runbook for identifying which cost dimension is driving your AWS RDS or Aurora bill before making any changes.
L3 Reference Guide
Databases Database Backup Validation Workflow
A repeatable runbook for proving that your database backups are actually restorable — with exact commands, decision tree, and automation patterns.
L3 Reference Guide
Databases PostgreSQL Connection Storm Runbook
Diagnosing and resolving connection exhaustion in PostgreSQL: too many clients, idle-in-transaction accumulation, and the case for connection pooling.
L2 Deep Dive
Databases Aurora MySQL Writer CPU Spike Workflow
A systematic runbook for diagnosing Aurora MySQL writer CPU spikes — from Performance Insights through lock contention, long transactions, and read offload.
L2 Deep Dive
Databases MySQL Replication Lag Decision Tree
A systematic runbook for diagnosing MySQL replication lag — from initial SHOW REPLICA STATUS to parallel apply, long transactions, and relay log space.
L2 Deep Dive
Databases PostgreSQL Autovacuum Failure Workflow
A step-by-step runbook for diagnosing and resolving autovacuum failures: dead tuple accumulation, bloat, and transaction ID wraparound risk.
L2 Deep Dive
Databases Backups Are Not Recovery: The DBA Rule Everyone Learns Late
A backup file proves you captured data. Recovery is the process of producing a running, consistent database on a different system inside your RTO. They are not the same thing, and confusing them is how incidents get worse.
L2 Deep Dive
Databases MongoDB Query Performance Workflow
A systematic runbook for diagnosing slow MongoDB queries — from explain output through COLLSCAN, index selectivity, in-memory sort, and WiredTiger cache pressure.
L1 Field Note
Databases MySQL EXPLAIN: Reading the Plan Without Guessing
How to read MySQL EXPLAIN output systematically — type column, key column, rows estimate, and Extra flags — so you stop adding indexes blindly.
L3 Reference Guide
Databases MySQL Slow Query Playbook: From Slow Log to Fix
A repeatable workflow for diagnosing MySQL slow queries — from enabling the slow log through reading EXPLAIN output to committing a safe fix.
L1 Field Note
Databases PostgreSQL Autovacuum: What Every Engineer Should Know
Autovacuum is not optional maintenance — it is the mechanism that prevents table bloat and transaction ID wraparound from taking your database offline.
L3 Reference Guide
Databases PostgreSQL Slow Query Triage Workflow
A structured runbook for diagnosing slow query root causes in PostgreSQL — missing indexes, stale statistics, lock contention, and I/O saturation — in the order that wastes the least time.