Runbook pages.

▲Notes from the workbench

Runbook pages.

pages from a runbook

I write about things I build, problems I get stuck on, and whatever I'm learning along the way.

Projects Read the blog (16)

Shipped

leakferret

context-aware secret scanner leakferret.com ↗ GitHub ↗

I built a secret scanner in Rust, then made it available in the terminal, editor, and coding-agent workflow. It separates a suspected credential from a provider-confirmed one and proposes environment-variable rewrites.

Inside the build

Selected posts

Reading shelf

  • Designing Data-Intensive Applications Martin Kleppmann
    I went back for the chapters on replication and transactions. They made more sense after operating the failure modes.
  • Site Reliability Engineering Google
    The incident response and capacity chapters still earn their place on the shelf.
  • Working Effectively with Legacy Code Michael Feathers
    Older than much of the code it would help with, and still painfully accurate.
  • Database Internals Alex Petrov
    Enough detail to explain the machinery without pretending I am writing a storage engine.
  • Understanding Distributed Systems Roberto Vitillo
    A compact map of the problems that become real only after something ships.
  • Working with Ruby Threads Jesse Storimer
    The GVL chapter remains the best starting point, even though Ruby gained several new concurrency tools.
  • The Code Book Simon Singh
    I read this as a teenager. It was my first serious invitation into security.
Talk is cheap. Show me the code.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.
Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.
The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity.
One man's constant is another man's variable.

Topics

Browse 47 topics
distributed systems 8 platform 7 reliability 6 rails 5 postgresql 4 redis 3 ruby 3 architecture 2 concurrency 2 kafka 2 kubernetes 2 logging 2 observability 2 rabbitmq 2 semantic_logger 2 active record 1 async 1 choreography 1 configmap 1 data modeling 1 database architecture 1 databases 1 debugging 1 delayed delivery 1 delivery semantics 1 devsecops 1 event-driven architecture 1 exactly once 1 fiber 1 idempotency 1 mcp 1 message queues 1 performance 1 pgbouncer 1 pre-commit 1 property graphs 1 publish-subscribe 1 queues 1 ractor 1 rust 1 secret scanning 1 security 1 shift left 1 sql pgq 1 timestamps 1 transactional outbox 1 transactions 1

Writing timeline

When config edits start feeling like deploys · April 2026 Rolling PgBouncer without dropped queries · May 2026 Tuning Rails log levels per class, without a redeploy · May 2026 Dynamic per-user Rails debug logs, scoped to the request · May 2026 Debugging Redis::CannotConnectError in Ruby · May 2026 What concurrent Ruby looks like, twelve years after the book · May 2026 Catching the secret before the commit, not after the audit · June 2026 Delayed delivery without unbounded queues · June 2026 Redis keys need owners · July 2026 The graph database you don’t have to add yet · July 2026 Exactly once, where? · August 2026 The transaction stops at the network · August 2026 The event was delivered. The work was not. · August 2026 Now depends on who you ask · September 2026 One slow consumer can stop every RabbitMQ publisher · September 2026 Booking the last concert seat · September 2026

April 2026 hover a dot to see what published when September 2026

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