Backend
The Developer's Guide to Timeouts
Most HTTP clients ship with no timeout at all. How to set connect, read and database timeouts that fail fast instead of hanging forever.
Gareth Clubb 6 min read Tag
Reliability
10 articles tagged with "Reliability"
Gareth Clubb 6 min read Backend
How to Design Webhooks That Don't Lose Events
Webhook design guide: at-least-once delivery, retries with backoff, idempotent consumers, HMAC signatures, and why you should never trust event order.
David White 6 min read Architecture
The Saga Pattern: Managing Distributed Transactions Without Two-Phase Commit
A practical guide to the saga pattern: choreography vs orchestration, compensating transactions, and how to keep distributed workflows consistent without 2PC.
Gareth Clubb 9 min read Architecture
The Transactional Outbox Pattern: Reliable Event Publishing Explained
A practical guide to the transactional outbox pattern: how to publish events reliably from a database write, avoid dual-write bugs, and handle replay.
Zubair Hasan 10 min read DevOps
Service Level Objectives: A Developer's Guide to SLOs and Error Budgets
A practical guide to setting and tracking SLOs: pick meaningful SLIs, calculate error budgets, alert on burn rate, and avoid the metrics that mislead teams.
Jonny Rowse 9 min read Backend
How to Design Idempotent API Endpoints
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 Code Quality
Why Your Tests Are Flaky and How to Fix Them
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 Backend
The Developer's Guide to Background Jobs and Task Queues
Learn when and how to use background jobs and task queues. Practical patterns for reliable async processing in modern web applications.
Zubair Hasan 9 min read Code Quality
Effective Error Handling Patterns for Cleaner Code
Practical error handling patterns that make your code more reliable, debuggable, and easier to maintain across any language.
Jonny Rowse 8 min read