tl;dr:“I worked at Stripe for about seven years, from 2012 to 2019. Over that time, I used and contributed to many generations of Stripe’s developer environment – the tools that engineers used daily to write and test code. I think Stripe did a pretty good job designing and building that developer experience, and since leaving, I’ve found myself repeatedly describing features of that environment to friends and colleagues.”
tl;dr:"I like to say that complex systems don’t usually fail for complex reasons, but for the simplest, dumbest possible reasons – there are just more available dumb reasons. But sometimes, complex systems do fail for complex reasons, and tracking them down does require understanding across many of the different layers of abstraction we’ve built up. This is a story of such a bug."
tl;dr:"This is the story of a bug we recently put to rest; a bug which, from our very first inklings of its existence, I repeatedly described as “cursed.” Now that we understand it, I want to share just how delightfully cursed it was."
tl;dr:"SQL as an API is in many ways a relic from another era, and while it’s held up remarkably well, it also feels like it shows its age... it feels like SQL engines barely even try to offer predictability performance or to build reliable guard rails against accidentally taking the entire site down."