Writing

39 long-form articles on production engineering — how real systems fail, why, and what actually fixed them.

2 articles matching “Hot Keys”

ObservabilityJul 13, 202616 min read

Averages Are a Lie — The Long Tail That Quietly Runs Every System You Build, From p99 Latency to Hot Keys

The bell curve taught you the average is a fair summary and outliers are rare. In software both halves are false: latencies, key popularity, file sizes and follower counts are heavy-tailed power laws where the outliers…

Architecture DecisionsMay 2, 202620 min read

Caching Is Not 'Add Redis' — A Layer-by-Layer Tour from CPU to CDN

A senior-engineer walkthrough of the whole cache stack: CPU L1/L2/L3, TLB, OS page cache, DB buffer pool, in-process LRU (Caffeine), distributed cache (Redis/Memcached), HTTP cache + ETags, CDN edge, browser, DNS, reverse proxies, query plan cache.