@elenarossi
Engineering Manager
Helping teams ship calmly. Ex-IC who still reads PRs.
We ran into this around CI pipelines on a quiet Sunday incident. I expected a tooling problem. It was an assumption in the schema. EXPLAIN and a short rollback window saved the afternoon. Writes slowed first, then a handful of reads timed out. Dropping the unused index and batching the backfill unblocked the queue. I now review write paths with the same care as the happy-path query.
No spike in CPU. Error budgets looked fine at a glance. Users still reported blank pages in a thin slice of traffic. Logs only showed upstream resets with no clear application exception. The culprit was a stale keep-alive timeout between nginx and the app. Aligning idle timeouts stopped the intermittent 502s within an hour. We also added a dashboard for upstream reset reasons so the next page is faster.
We extracted one high-churn billing endpoint behind a strangler facade. Dual-writes ran for two weeks while we compared totals nightly. A feature flag controlled read traffic so we could roll back instantly. The hardest part was matching edge-case rounding in legacy invoices. Cutover finished with no customer-facing downtime and a smaller blast radius. We kept the facade until three more endpoints followed the same path.
We needed locks so queue workers did not process the same job twice. Redis SET NX was faster under load and easy to expire automatically. Postgres advisory locks were simpler operationally for our small team. Failover behavior mattered more than raw latency in our case. We chose Postgres first, then moved hot paths to Redis later. Pick the lock store you can operate confidently at 3am.
Curious how teams balance generated clients and hand-written SDKs. OpenAPI docs help humans, but drift still sneaks into multi-repo setups. Generated clients catch breaking changes in CI before they hit prod. They can also create noisy diffs when schemas change often. Plain fetch wrappers stay flexible but hide contract mismatches. What has actually reduced production bugs on your teams?
We need traces and logs without hiring a full-time SRE. Right now we stitch screenshots from three tools during incidents. OpenTelemetry looks right, but the vendor choice is unclear. We ship weekly and cannot afford a six-month platform project. What has worked for small teams that still sleep at night? Especially interested in cost ceilings and onboarding time for juniors.