4 min read
GitHub Merge Queues: Serializing main Without Parking Every PR
How merge queues absorb the rebase race on protected branches, what CI has to guarantee, and when a queue is worse than Require branches to be up to date.
Tag
DevOps
Pipelines, environments, and the operational habits that keep enterprise software shipping.
12 articles
5 min read
Designing a Metrics System: Time-Series Storage from Gorilla to Downsampling
Ten million series, one datapoint each per 10 seconds, queried by tags: delta-of-delta compression, the inverted index over labels, and why high cardinality kills TSDBs.
5 min read
Designing Petabyte Log Search: Index Everything vs Grep Smarter
Logs are 100x your metrics volume and queried 0.001% as often. The Splunk-style full index, the Loki-style label-only bet, and bloom-filtered brute force in between.
5 min read
Designing a Distributed Tracing Backend: Dapper-Style Sampling and Storage
Tracing every request would need a system bigger than the one being traced. Head vs tail sampling, span ingestion pipelines, and storage laid out for trace reads.
10 min read
CI/CD Pipelines for Data Engineers
Data pipelines are production software. Here's how to build CI/CD that catches bad transforms before they corrupt dashboards: testing strategy, environment promotion, slim runs, and rollback patterns.
7 min read
Feature Flags: How to Stop Coupling Deployment to Release
Shipping code and releasing a feature are different events that most teams accidentally fuse together. Feature flags split them — and unlock trunk-based development, safe rollouts, and instant rollback.
5 min read
OpenTelemetry in .NET: Distributed Tracing Without Vendor Lock-In
Instrument your .NET services once with OpenTelemetry and ship traces to Jaeger, Grafana Tempo, or Azure Monitor — all without changing application code.
9 min read
Monitoring What Matters: Setting Up Alerts That Don't Cry Wolf
Most alerting setups produce noise that teams learn to ignore. Here is how to design alerts around the four golden signals, set thresholds that mean something, and build a system where every alert is worth waking someone up for.
7 min read
The Incident That Taught Me to Never Skip Staging — A Production Outage Story
A first-person account of a production outage caused by skipping staging. The small fix, the cascading failure, the 3am scramble, and the process changes that followed.
6 min read
Building a Zero-Downtime Deployment Pipeline with Azure DevOps and Slot Swaps
How to build a deployment pipeline that swaps staging and production slots on Azure App Service — with smoke tests, warm-up, rollback strategy, and a real YAML pipeline you can steal.
7 min read
Infrastructure as Code with Bicep: Moving Beyond ARM Templates
ARM templates are painful. Bicep fixes the developer experience with cleaner syntax, modules, and first-class Azure CLI integration. Here is how to migrate and start using it in your CI/CD pipelines.
3 min read
Fixing 'PowerShell Script Not Digitally Signed' — The Right Way
How to resolve execution policy errors when running .ps1 scripts, and why you should care about script signing in 2026.