Practical advice for engineers who want to ship better software, faster.
A practical developer onboarding playbook: get a new engineer from first day to first merged PR in under a week, without skipping the steps that matter.
Gareth Clubb 7 min read A practical guide to database connection pooling for Postgres and Node.js. Pool sizing, timeouts, PgBouncer, serverless pitfalls, and real numbers.
David White 8 min read A practical checklist for reviewing AI-generated code: what to check first, common failure modes, and how to combine AI with human review safely.
Jonny Rowse 10 min read A practical guide to designing idempotent API endpoints. Covers idempotency keys, HTTP semantics, storage patterns and the edge cases that usually bite first.
Zubair Hasan 9 min read Refactoring legacy code safely: a practical playbook with characterisation tests, seams, strangler fig, and small changes that keep production up.
Gareth Clubb 11 min read A practical comparison of message queues for developers: when to reach for RabbitMQ, Kafka, or SQS, plus delivery guarantees, ordering, and real costs.
Gareth Clubb 10 min read A practical guide to identifying and fixing flaky tests. Root causes from timing and async bugs to test pollution, with strategies to stabilise CI.
David White 7 min read A practical guide to legacy code analysis: how to audit an unfamiliar codebase, identify risks, map dependencies, and plan a safe path forward.
Zubair Hasan 12 min read A practical guide to API versioning strategies, from URL paths and headers to semantic versioning, with real-world examples and trade-offs.
David White 8 min read