A cache is a promise with an expiration date. That sounds obvious until a production system starts depending on cached state as if it were truth. Then the cache is no longer an optimization. It is a second source of truth with worse durability, weak...

I like caches that are easy to delete. That may sound strange, because the whole point of a cache is that it improves something important: latency, cost, load, or availability. But the safest caches are the ones the system can survive without. They ...

Most engineers think of the build as something that happens on their laptop. You type a command, the fans spin up, and a few minutes later you have a binary. That model is so ingrained that we rarely question it — until the codebase gets big enough t...

Go Interfaces: Why Less Is Almost Always More If you’re coming to Go from Java or C++, interfaces look familiar at first glance. You define a set of methods, types implement them, you write code against the interface. Same idea, right? Not quite. ...