maria khan.

▲Platform Engineer · Ruby on Rails · Kubernetes

maria khan.

pages from a runbook

I'm Maria. I write about the unglamorous shape of platform work. The parts that don't land on conference slides. Rails internals, Kubernetes patterns that survive on-call, dynamic configuration, the failure modes that take three days to debug and one line to fix.

Most platform work is invisible until it isn't. The interesting parts are the ones that don't make it into the change log.

What I think about

Rails internals Kubernetes patterns dynamic configuration distributed coordination observability incident response platform security monolith ergonomics

Lately

  • Drafting a long-form piece on the dynamic-config system I shipped. The kind of post I wish I had read before I started.
  • Did my first VAPT review on a service I owned. Half intimidating, half satisfying, half a long list of things I now want to read about.
  • Built a small in-browser etcd-watch playground for my own learning. Useless, fun, the kind of project a Saturday demands.
  • Read 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications' (again). Different parts hit this time.
  • Quietly removed three layers of caching that were each there to fix the previous one. Felt like cleaning a kitchen.
  • Started writing in the open after a year of journal entries that nobody read.

Reading shelf

  • Designing Data-Intensive Applications Martin Kleppmann the book everyone owns and re-reads. earned.
  • Site Reliability Engineering Google skip the fluff chapters; the post-mortem and capacity ones are gold.
  • Working Effectively with Legacy Code Michael Feathers older than half the platforms it would help with. still right.
  • Database Internals Alex Petrov the right level of detail for someone who works with databases but does not write them.
  • Understanding Distributed Systems Roberto Vitillo covers the parts of distributed systems that nobody warns you about until you ship something.
  • Crafting Interpreters Bob Nystrom I'll never write a compiler. Doesn't matter, the parsing chapters changed how I read code.

Stack

Daily

Ruby · Rails · Kubernetes · PostgreSQL · Redis · RabbitMQ · Sidekiq · Bash

Watching

Rust · Zig · etcd · Tigris · Temporal · ScyllaDB

Recent writing

All posts

Elsewhere