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Digs

Searching X architecture returns material written to be found by that query, which means tutorials and vendor pages. The material worth having was written by an engineer explaining a real system to their peers, and it uses different words. A dig is what comes back from going after that layer on one topic: the architecture reconstructed across real systems, the decisions and the conditions that flip them, what actually broke, and numbers you can plan against. Every claim is graded, linked and dated.

91 field guides 2462 graded sources 422 postmortems 8 categories
All AI & LLM Systems8 Data Platforms12 Distributed Systems10 Platform & Infrastructure24 Integration & APIs11 Security & Identity8 Reliability & Operations11 Cost & Efficiency7
Security & Identity 30 Sep 2026

Making a stolen session useless

A field guide to session and token theft, reconstructed from seven public incidents (Okta, Cloudflare x2, BeyondTrust, 1Password, GitHub, Meta, Storm-0558) and the standards now answering them (KEP-1205, DBSC,…

What surprised meThe controls teams reach for after a session theft, MFA, shorter lifetimes, rotation, do not change the one fact that made it work: the server cannot…
26 sources · 22 organisations · 9 postmortems 27 min read
session-managementtoken-theftauthenticationrevocationzero-trust
Data Platforms 30 Sep 2026

The shim outlives the migration: ten years of Sentry, read from its own deletions

Every team that outgrows its first database plans the new one; almost nobody plans the period when both are running. This guide measures that period across a decade of Sentry, reconstructed from git: five node…

What surprised meThe dual-backend shims outlived what they were built to retire: 4 months for one, 66 for another, and 91 and counting for the third, whose dead Redis…
31 sources · 3 organisations · 6 postmortems 34 min read
sentryclickhousekafkastorage-migrationtechnical-debt
Cost & Efficiency 29 Sep 2026

The discount is a repossession clause

Every large cloud sells the same machines twice: firm capacity at list price and the same capacity at 60-91% off with the right to take it back on 30 to 120 seconds' best-effort notice. This guide reconstructs…

What surprised meAWS's own best-practices documentation strongly warns against the spot-with-on-demand-failover pattern for capacity-intolerant workloads, the exact p…
23 sources · 12 organisations · 3 postmortems 27 min read
spot-instancespreemptiblecapacitykubernetesautoscaling
Reliability & Operations 29 Sep 2026

Where resilience policy lives: Netflix, 2016 to 2026

Between 2016 and 2026 almost every Netflix library that decided something about the network was retired, while the libraries that decide something about data were not. This guide reconstructs that decade from …

What surprised meThe four deprecated Netflix libraries all show a December 2025 commit, because one engineer pushed the same CI change into Hystrix, Ribbon, Servo and…
22 sources · 4 organisations · 4 postmortems 28 min read
netflixresilienceload-sheddingservice-discoverydeprecation
Security & Identity 28 Sep 2026

Letting humans into production

A field guide to the human-access plane: the three legitimate doors into production (automation, pre-validated tooling, audited break-glass), why none of the six investigated breaches defeated an approval gate…

What surprised meNot one of the six investigated breaches describes an approval gate being defeated; every one walked around the gates on a standing credential or a l…
27 sources · 23 organisations · 5 postmortems 32 min read
access-controlzero-standing-privilegejust-in-time-accessbreak-glassleast-privilege
Platform & Infrastructure 28 Sep 2026

The parts that outlived the product: ten years of Docker, read from its own repositories

A decade of one company's architecture told through the sequence every platform team eventually faces: bundle to win the workflow, extract components to cut the blast radius of your own releases, specify the b…

What surprised meThe 2018 authorization fix that shipped in Engine 18.09.1 is not an ancestor of v19.03, v20.10, v23.0 or v27.1.0; the commit first appears in a tagge…
38 sources · 9 organisations · 5 postmortems 35 min read
containerscontainerdruncopen-sourceplatform-strategy
Platform & Infrastructure 27 Sep 2026

Boundaries without a network hop: ten years of Shopify, read from its own artefacts

Reconstructs a decade of one company's architecture from artefacts rather than announcements: repository archive notices, release notes of the language it forks, design documents inside the reference implement…

What surprised meHaving got YJIT into CRuby, declared stable on the strength of a year in production, and enabled by default in Rails, Shopify started over: Ruby 4.0.…
30 sources · 8 organisations · 2 postmortems 31 min read
monolithwebassemblyrubystatic-analysissandboxing
Data Platforms 27 Sep 2026

There is no neutral identifier

Reads the repositories of GitLab, Rails, PostgreSQL, Twitter, Mastodon, Nextcloud, CockroachDB and the IETF's UUID revision to reconstruct how identifiers are chosen, sized, ordered and exposed. A reader leave…

What surprised meThe two halves of the database industry give opposite advice about the same property and both are right: the PostgreSQL world spent a decade making k…
24 sources · 15 organisations · 4 postmortems 29 min read
identifiersprimary-keysuuidsnowflakepostgres
Data Platforms 26 Sep 2026

Every backend you add is a six-year promise: ten years of Grafana Labs in git

A decade of Grafana Labs reconstructed entirely from its own git history across ten repositories: the convergence of Mimir, Loki, Tempo and Pyroscope on object storage plus a Kafka write path, the fork decisio…

What surprised meThe rewrites all landed roughly on schedule; the removals took four to six years and arrived in one wave, and one of them was reverted eight days aft…
26 sources · 4 organisations · 4 postmortems 35 min read
observabilityobject-storagedeprecationkafkaforks