The mechanics of shipping: pipelines, environments, testing and the operational detail that decides whether releases are boring.
39 articles, most recent first within each group.
Idempotency & Retries
- Reliable Webhook Delivery: Retries, Exponential Backoff, Dead-Letter and Idempotent Receivers
- This Fixes: CrashLoopBackOff and OOMKilled Pods
- Recovering From a Botched Interactive Rebase With the Reflog
- Why did my cron job not run? A Systematic Diagnostic Checklist
- This Fixes: Clients Hammering Your API After a 429 Because You Forgot Retry-After
- Autovacuum Tuning for a Write-Heavy Postgres Table
- Designing Filter, Sort and Field-Selection Query Params Without Reinventing SQL
- This Fixes: Unhandled Promise Rejections Crashing Your Express API
- systemd Timers Instead of cron: A Backup Job That Logs, Retries and Survives Reboots
- Idempotency Keys Done Right: Making POST Safe to Retry in FastAPI + Redis
Dependency Management
- Why Did a Patch Release Break My CI Overnight
- Cutting CI Time: Dependency Caching in GitHub Actions That Actually Hits
- SBOM in the Pipeline, Signed and Attested: Syft, Cosign and in-toto
- Pinning Dependencies by Exact Version and Hash
- When your agency finishes and walks away: what comes next
Budgeting & Cost Control
- Why IT projects keep going over budget
- What 'build and oversee' actually means — and why it's different from hiring an agency
- What a software specification should actually include
- How to manage a software development agency without being technical
- Ten questions to ask before you hire a software development agency
- What good software delivery governance looks like in practice
DevOps & CI/CD
- Version-Controlled Dotfiles With chezmoi: One Repo, Every Machine, No Symlink Mess
- Why I Switched All My Git Remotes From HTTPS to SSH (and the One Case Where HTTPS Still Wins)
- set -euo pipefail Explained: What Each Flag Actually Protects You From
- A pre-commit Baseline That Actually Runs: Config, Auto-Fix, and CI Enforcement
- Instrumenting the DORA Four: Lead Time, Deploy Frequency, MTTR and Change-Failure Rate
More in this area
- Per-Project Environments With direnv: Auto-Loading Secrets and PATH on cd
- pg_dump and pg_restore: The Flags That Actually Matter
- Baseline Windows Server 2022 Setup: Core vs Desktop, Roles, and First Hardening Pass
- Structured JSON Logging for APIs: Correlation IDs, Request Context and No More print()
- Running Containers as Non-Root
- Why did my bash script work by hand but fail in cron?
- Don't forget your offshore team disappears for a week on 1 October
- Don't forget to plan for skeleton staff: change freeze, on-call rota, vendor SLA reality check
- Don't forget that half of Europe is shut on 15 August
- logrotate for Application Logs That systemd Doesn't Manage
- Structured Logging and Transcripts for PowerShell Automation
- logrotate Done Right: A Config Recipe That Won't Fill Your Disk
- Your software project was delivered. Your team doesn't use it. What went wrong?