Get the weekly digestSubscribe

/ THE FEED /

Read what ships.

Deep, recent reads ranked by depth and freshness.

Microservicesremove filterAWSremove filterPerformanceremove filterObservabilityremove filterClear all

  1. 01Cloudflare · architecture

    Origin Range Requests: Serving large files without range-request tuning

    Cloudflare replaced a legacy, fixed-size range caching design that suffered from bandwidth waste and memory pressure with a Pingora-based chunk coordinator. The new implementation dynamically combines cached chunks and aligned origin fetches to serve range requests accurately without manual tuning. This approach cut p99 time to first byte in half for R2 storage and reduced tiered cache traffic by six percent.

    DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read3 days ago

    DatabasesPerformanceRedis

    Sign in to save and rate

  2. 02Amazon Web Services · architecture

    Automate medical coding with Step Functions and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

    Automating medical coding requires a hybrid approach that combines deterministic orchestration with bounded agentic reasoning to ensure safety, auditability, and human oversight. The team built a workflow using AWS Step Functions, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore that evaluates terms cheapest-first via block-lists, exact matching, and finally an LLM agent for ambiguous cases. This design successfully autocodes confident cases while routing ambiguous ones to human reviewers with full audit trails and decision explanations.

    DEPTH ■■■■■15 min read5 days ago

    AWS

    Sign in to save and rate

  3. 03GitHub · 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 read12 days ago

    Microservices

    Sign in to save and rate

  4. 04Zalando · 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

    Sign in to save and rate

  5. 05GitHub · migration

    Improving site performance by shipping more CSS

    GitHub faced performance degradation on server-side rendering and initial page loads due to scaling issues with its CSS-in-JS solution. The engineering team executed a multi-year migration to CSS Modules and eliminated dynamic styling props using incremental rollouts, wrapper components, and automation tools. This resulted in significant performance gains, including 55% faster server-side rendering and the complete removal of styled-components.

    DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read4 weeks ago

    FrontendPerformance

    Sign in to save and rate

  6. 06Stack Overflow · practice

    Taking a look under your agent’s hood

    This post discusses the challenges and methods of applying observability to AI agents, which combine traditional distributed systems telemetry with new requirements for monitoring LLMs and multi-step tool calls. The discussion highlights how non-deterministic agent behavior and increased speed of execution make continuous production feedback loops essential for upstream development. Ultimately, integrating observability data into automated testing and development loops helps teams iterate on agent performance.

    DEPTH ■■■■■25 min read2 weeks ago

    Machine LearningObservability

    Sign in to save and rate