Field notes

Notes from production.

Longer, more technical write-ups of work we have delivered. The work and services pages cover the same projects in plain language.

Cloud

Off shared hosting, without a maintenance window

The hard part of leaving shared hosting is rarely the new infrastructure. It is the undocumented behaviour the old environment was quietly providing.

7 min read

Reliability

Recovery that happens before the pager

A crashed backend process that nobody notices is an outage with a delay on it. Supervision is a smaller problem than the monitoring stack it often gets confused with.

5 min read

Engineering

Crawling a site that does not want to be crawled

Live data behind someone else’s rendering layer is a scheduling and correctness problem long before it is a scraping problem.

6 min read