Cover essay · Issue 47

The case against ambient consensus: why most of your distributed systems aren’t.

An honest look at three production deployments — one Raft cluster, one CRDT-based store, and a quorum-write SQL fleet — and the operational scars they each left behind.

Systems · Long read

The unreasonable effectiveness of plain TCP keepalives in modern microservices

Six teams, six clever proxy-stacks, one unkillable bug. We trace why so many idle-connection failures map back to a five-line sysctl change you forgot to ship.

Mart Lehto · 14-min read · May 24

Profile

“We rewrote the scheduler twice, and twice we were wrong”: a candid hour with the Bitwarden infra team

An on-the-record postmortem of a multi-region active-active build that almost shipped, and the boring fix that finally did.

Interview · Anna Pekkanen · 22-min read · May 20

Data infrastructure

Postgres 17, two years on: what actually paid off, what didn’t

A field report on logical-replication, JSONB compression and parallel vacuum across 18 production deployments. The wins are real but smaller than the marketing.

Petri Kallio · 11-min read · May 17

Engineering culture

Stop calling it “tech debt.” You meant something else.

A short essay on why the term has stopped meaning anything useful, and a more precise vocabulary for the four very different problems we hide behind it.

Editorial · 6-min read · May 15

Interview

Building observability that survives layoffs — a conversation with the team behind grafana-loki

Three engineers, one product, four reorganizations in two years. What stayed, what shipped, what they would do differently.

Interview · Lina Holm · 19-min read · May 12

Essay

Why your monorepo is fine, actually

Push-back on the recent anti-monorepo wave. The cost surface most blog posts skip is real, but it isn’t where you think.

Mart Lehto · 8-min read · May 10