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    • Notes

    Short things worth keeping: what a review decided, why a flag exists, what to try next time.

    9 notes 4 tags last written Thursday

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    Nine notes since the middle of September, newest first.

    Cap retries at four

    Nine retries turn one slow shard into a flood. Four tries with a two second wait keeps the tail latency inside the budget.

    1 October · atlas

    The queue needs a dead letter path

    Messages that fail three times go nowhere today, so we lose them quietly. Give them somewhere to land and someone to read it.

    1 October · hummingbird

    Release notes are for the reader

    Say what changed for the person running it, not which pull requests merged. The list of commits is already in the repository.

    30 September · ledger

    One place for retry logic

    Three services each have their own backoff. Put it in one library so a change lands everywhere at once.

    30 September · atlas

    Sentence case, everywhere

    Titles, headings, buttons and chips all read as sentences. Capitals only for names and the first word.

    29 September · docs

    Flags need an end date

    Every flag we added to turn something off is still there. Write the date it comes out in the same commit that adds it.

    29 September · hummingbird

    Migrations in three steps

    Write the new column, fill it in the background, then read from it. Never do two of those in one deploy.

    25 September · ledger

    Name metrics after what they count

    A gauge called queue_health tells nobody anything. Call it queue_depth and let the dashboard say whether that is healthy.

    24 September · hummingbird

    The quota page needs an example

    Readers search for the error text, not the concept. Put the exact message on the page and the fix under it.

    23 September · docs

    Tags

    Four of them, one per project. Open a tag to see what it holds.

    atlas

    Two notes. Both about retries: the cap of four attempts, and moving the backoff into one library. The migration plan has its own note under ledger.

    ledger

    Two notes. How to write a release note, and the three-step rule for schema migrations. Both came out of the 2.3 postmortem.

    hummingbird

    Three notes. The dead letter path, the end date on every flag, and naming metrics after what they count.

    docs

    Two notes. Sentence case everywhere, and putting the exact error message on the quota page so search finds it.

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    A. Reyes

    Signed in on this machine.

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