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Deep, recent reads ranked by depth and freshness.

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  1. 01The Pragmatic Engineer · architecture

    The Pulse: Anthropic builds its own source control system

    Anthropic experienced a massive increase in code merges due to the heavy use of AI coding agents, which quickly overwhelmed standard Git scaling limits and CI checkouts. To solve this, a small engineering team built a custom centralized version control system called Scion backed by Google Spanner and Cloud Storage, along with a code review tool called Antique. This move successfully migrated the entire monorepo off Git and eliminated bottlenecks, though the architecture drew controversy over similarities to Meta's Mononoke.

    DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read4 days ago

    ArchitectureDistributed Systems

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  2. 02GitHub · architecture

    From 2,500 requests to 24: Rebuilding star history without the stargazers

    GitHub faced abuse and performance issues because tools were scraping user identities to reconstruct repository star history. The engineering team collaborated with maintainers to build a purpose-built aggregate endpoint that returns daily star counts without identities and filters by time before aggregation. This reduced request volume from thousands to a few dozen and eliminated heavy database scans.

    DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read11 days ago

    Microservices

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  3. 03Zalando · postmortem

    Thundering herd of circuit breakers

    An engineering team investigated why a client-side circuit breaker repeatedly failed to close on its own after an outage. By exporting OpenTelemetry traces into a custom visualization tool, they discovered that low probe traffic caused the autoscaler to scale down the service to minimum capacity, triggering a thundering herd of requests and immediate timeouts the moment the circuit breaker closed. Adjusting the system to account for capacity and probe representativeness prevents this oscillation.

    DEPTH ■■■■■10 min read2 weeks ago

    MicroservicesObservabilityReliability

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