Articles
Worth reading
A short take on pieces worth your time — architecture, AI, system design, and engineering careers — each one linked back to its original source.
15 articles
The Death of Microservices Hype: When Modular Monoliths Win
A sober look at the 2026 correction away from "microservices by default": teams that adopted them before they had the scale to justify the operational cost are quietly moving back toward modular monoliths — a single deployable unit with real internal module boundaries, rather than either a tangled legacy monolith or a fleet of distributed services. The honest takeaway isn't "microservices were wrong," it's that the decision needs to follow actual scale and team-topology pressure, not architecture-conference hype.
What Is RAG? How Retrieval-Augmented Generation Works
A clear, current walkthrough of retrieval-augmented generation: why it exists (grounding an LLM in your own data instead of relying on what it memorized during training), how the retrieval-then-generate pipeline actually works, and where teams run into trouble in practice — the retrieval step, not the model, is almost always the real failure point. Useful if you're deciding whether RAG is the right pattern for a project, or just want a precise mental model instead of the marketing version.
Netflix Tackles Data Deletion at Scale with Centralized Platform Architecture
InfoQ's coverage of a QCon talk on a problem almost nobody designs for up front: how do you actually delete data, correctly and completely, across dozens of heterogeneous storage systems, at a scale where 76.8 billion row deletions across 1,300 datasets is a normal workload? Netflix's centralized deletion platform is a reminder that "delete" is a distributed systems problem with its own consistency and observability requirements, not an afterthought bolted onto each service. Especially relevant if you're anywhere near GDPR or CCPA compliance work and have been treating deletion as someone else's problem.
How we prepare Shopify for BFCM
Kyle Petroski and Matthew Frail's inside look at the nine months of capacity planning, chaos engineering, and load testing at 150% of projected peak that goes into Shopify surviving Black Friday/Cyber Monday, a weekend that hit 489 million requests per minute across 90 petabytes of data in 2025. What stands out is the organizational structure as much as the technical one: capacity planning, infrastructure roadmap, and readiness testing run as three parallel tracks for most of a year. A good reminder that scaling for a known traffic spike is a program, not a sprint right before the event.
Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025
Matthew Prince's own postmortem of the outage that took down a meaningful chunk of the internet for several hours, X, ChatGPT, and Cloudflare's own status page among the casualties, and the root cause is almost mundane: a database permissions change caused a bot-management "feature file" to double in size and blow past a hardcoded limit. It's a good reminder that the scariest outages rarely come from novel attacks; they come from ordinary config changes interacting badly with an assumption nobody revisited. Prince's willingness to publish the gory detail, including where their own tooling made diagnosis slower, is what makes this worth reading over a sanitized summary.