▲Platform Engineer · Ruby on Rails · Kubernetes
maria khan.
pages from a runbook
I'm Maria. I started this blog to write down the things I've spent a week debugging, partly so I remember them, partly because writing forces me to actually understand them. Email's on the contact page.
Most platform work is invisible until it isn't. The interesting parts are the ones that don't make it into the change log.
What I think about
system design Rails internals Kubernetes patterns dynamic configuration distributed coordination concurrency observability incident response secure code platform security threat modeling context engineering monolith ergonomics
Lately
- Drafting a long-form piece on the dynamic-config system I shipped. The kind of post I wish I had read before I started.
- Sat through a secure code review. Half intimidating, half satisfying, half a long list of things I now want to read about.
- Built a small in-browser etcd-watch playground for my own learning. Useless, fun, the kind of project a Saturday demands.
- Read 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications' (again). Different parts hit this time.
- Quietly removed three layers of caching that were each there to fix the previous one. Felt like cleaning a kitchen.
- Started writing in the open after a year of journal entries that nobody read.
Reading shelf
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications the book everyone owns and re-reads. earned.
- Site Reliability Engineering skip the fluff chapters; the post-mortem and capacity ones are gold.
- Working Effectively with Legacy Code older than half the platforms it would help with. still right.
- Database Internals the right level of detail for someone who works with databases but does not write them.
- Understanding Distributed Systems covers the parts of distributed systems that nobody warns you about until you ship something.
- Crafting Interpreters I'll never write a compiler. Doesn't matter, the parsing chapters changed how I read code.
Stack
Daily
Ruby · Rails · Kubernetes · PostgreSQL · Redis · RabbitMQ · Sidekiq · Bash
Watching
Rust · Zig · etcd · Tigris · Temporal · ScyllaDB
Recent writing
All postsElsewhere