Tag: production

Writing about production systems - the failure modes, trade-offs, and decisions that only reveal themselves under real load.

06 May 2026
What's a Circuit Breaker?
I'd not been interviewed very often. For my first job, sure, I sent around my CV to a bunch of places and did a bunch o...
15 Apr 2026
Holding the Fort
For many years, I loved my job. I was working on a production system that saw tens of thousands of orders across the wo...
14 Apr 2026
I Chose to Keep Going
In 2008, we all watched Pivotal crash and burn. They'd taken a year and nearly £900k to build a new ticketing system fo...
14 Apr 2026
Always On
I knew as soon as my phone rang what it was about. It was the same every time. I would drag myself up to answer the ph...
14 Apr 2026
Did They Have a Problem That Year?
2008 was a heck of a year for kraya, and for me. We were already operating megabus.com in the UK, USA, and Canada, alon...
13 Apr 2026
What we Carried
I started my company in 2000. I was 17. I built megabus.com in 2003. I was 21. It started off small, and little by lit...
13 Apr 2026
Whatcha Thinking?
I loved working on megabus. I was in love with it. My girlfriend at the time had a habit of asking what I was thinking ...
07 Apr 2026
Priced In
Two ticketing systems. Same client. Same payment provider. We were moving fast — that was the explicit choice, theirs a...
31 Mar 2026
I Know People Like You
A few years ago, I was interviewed for a role. I was talking about a ticketing system I'd built - originally in Spring,...
24 Mar 2026
It Gets Everywhere
In 1999, I was building websites in ASP (before there was .NET) and MSSQL Server. We had a Windows NT server that I had...
24 Mar 2026
Even Light Gets Heavier
A dedicated input type is better than reusing your domain model at the API boundary. Test layers matter. Writing log st...
11 Feb 2026
We Optimised Ourselves to Death
How iteration without identity becomes drift - and why unmade decisions quietly compound risk.
17 Jul 2024
Microservices vs Monolith: Real World Tradeoffs
When starting a new backend system for a contract I was on, one of the early decisions I had to make was whether to lea...
06 Nov 2011
PostgreSQL performing huge updates
PostgreSQL is a pretty powerful database server and will work with almost any settings thrown at it. It is really good ...
02 Nov 2011
Tracking progress of an update statement
Sometimes there is a need to execute a long running update statement. This update statement might be modifying millions...
25 Apr 2011
Java Object Size In Memory
Anyone who has worked with java in a high end application will be well aware of the double edged sword that is java gar...