We Cut a 190 GB Production Database to 45 GB in One Night. Here's What We Learne

<blockquote> <p>The pager went off at 2:14 AM.</p> </blockquote> <p>If you’ve spent any time operating distributed systems, you know that sound. It doesn’t just wake you up; it

<p><em>B-tree internals, column order and planner statistics in Postgres 19, checked against MongoDB's ESR rule.</em></p> <p>Most "add an index" advice stops at <code>CREATE

<p>On January 28, 2026, Moltbook launched to considerable fanfare. The pitch was bold: an "agent-first, human-second" social network where 1.5 million autonomous AI agents could

<p>The thing that breaks before 1,000 users is almost never the code.</p> <p>Not a race condition. Not a memory leak. Not a missing index. Founders assume their app will collapse

<p>Four agents entered an infinite loop in November 2025. They ran for 11 days. The bill was $47,000. Nobody noticed until it was over.</p> <p>The team was running a market

<h1> Production Was Down… But Everything Looked Normal 🤯 </h1> <blockquote> <p>A real debugging story about silent failures and why thinking matters more than tools.</p>

<blockquote> <p>At some point, every growing system starts collecting ghosts.</p> </blockquote> <p>So you have a job as a software engineer.</p> <p>You build systems. APIs.

<p><em>The AWS Reliability Files, Part 1</em></p> <p>I told an AI a true fact about AWS. Then I had a second AI confidently insist it was wrong. Within one exchange, the first