/Best Practices

My Notes On GitLab Postgres Schema Design

- Shekhar Gulati tl;dr: "My motivation to understand the schema of a big project like Gitlab was to compare it against schemas I am designing and learn some best practices from their schema definition. I can surely say I learnt a lot."

featured in #338

Best Practices For Making API Calls At Scale

- David Donnelly tl;dr: 3’s a crowd and 429’s a rate limit exceeded error. We explore best practices for making API calls at scale, the 4 most common ways rate limits are implemented, and a methodology for avoiding rate limits dynamically.

featured in #331

Best Practices For Inclusive CLIs

- Rohan Kumar tl;dr: "This began as a reply to another article that lists practices to improve user-experience of command-line interfaces... Unfortunately, a number of its suggestions are problematic, particularly from an accessibility perspective." Rohan elaborates on these and and discusses best practices for inclusive CLIs. 

featured in #325

How I Think About Code Management

- Andreas Klinger tl;dr: Split code management into 2 tasks: Reducing complexity & increasing confidence. (1) Reducing complexity so you have fewer parts and interconnections between them. Develop "concepts with better boundaries." (2) Increase confidence by streamlining. Minimize ways things can be done, make them obvious and make sure they work. Andreas explains light-weight processes to do both. 

featured in #305

What's In A Good Error Message?

- Gunnar Morling tl;dr: Three pieces of information should be conveyed by an error message: (1) Context: What led to the error? What was the code trying to do when it failed? (2) The error itself: What exactly failed? (3) Mitigation: What needs to be done in order to overcome the error? Gunnar also highlights best practices: having a uniform voice and style, consistency in terminology, and more.

featured in #282

10 Rules For Better Cloud Security

- Thomas Segura tl;dr: (1) Limit manual configurations, (2) Design a recovery program to recover from outside accounts, providers, or locales. (3) Regularly review your DNS and cloud configurations to prevent take-over situations, and more.

featured in #275

OOPS Writeups

- Lorin Hochstein tl;dr: Operational Surprises (OOPS) is when something unexpected happened in operations and presents an opportunity to discover how the observed system behavior deviated from the mental model of how the system is supposed to behave. The template shared in this post is based on the template used at Netflix.

featured in #274

Save Your Engineers' Sleep: Best Practices For On-call Processes

- James Frost tl;dr: 8 best practices shared including: (1) Alerts are treated as code i.e. go through code reviews, generated from existing modules. (2) Use percentiles over averages to get a higher quality signal. (3) Use playbooks to document each alert so there is corresponding documentation that explains what is broken and how to investigate and fix it. 

featured in #274

The Developer’s Guide to SSO

tl;dr: Single-sign-on via SAML or oAuth is often one of the first features an engineering team needs to build as a product gains traction among larger customers. We explore how it works, how to add it to your app, and best practices for implementation.

featured in #265

Engineering Onboarding - Built to Scale

- Jamshed Vesuna tl;dr: Management at Robinhood rebuilt their engineering onboarding process around 3 key themes: learning experience, community building, and purposeful team matching, each outlined here.

featured in #264