Production lessons
The green dashboard lied to us
Every metric was within threshold. The service was down for half the users. Availability and health are not the same thing.
Writing
Notes on building systems that have to work.
Architecture decisions, distributed systems, and production lessons examined through their trade-offs.
All articles
05 entriesDistributed systems
Why I stopped treating the outbox as optional
Transactional outbox is not ceremony — it is how you survive duplicate delivery and partial failures.
Testing
Integration tests are where your design gets judged
Unit tests tell you if a class works. Integration tests tell you if the system you designed can actually be assembled and run.
Architecture thinking
When asynchronous messaging makes the system worse
Messaging solves coupling in time, but it also introduces failure modes that many systems never needed.
.NET engineering
Business rules belong in the domain, not in handlers
MediatR handlers are coordination. When validation and invariants live there, the design looks clean until the rules need to be reused.