The newsletter
Field Notes
One deep dive a month on production systems: what broke, what the evidence said, and the general lesson worth carrying into your own stack. No roundups, no "top 10 tools", no week where I mail you something just because it is a Tuesday.
What you get
A real failure, traced end to end
Symptom, evidence, the hypothesis that turned out to be wrong, the mechanism that actually mattered, and how the fix was verified.
The limits of the lesson
When the model applies and when it does not, because most advice that travels well is advice that says where it stops.
One thing you can act on
A check to run, an invariant to write down, a default to change. Never a reading list.
Start here
New subscribers get the Production Systems series as a short course, one part at a time, before the monthly issues begin.
- 01The Acknowledgment Gap - How Event-Driven Systems Lose Messages Without Errors
- 02When "no healthy upstream" isn't about the upstream you think
- 03Replacing a Critical Data Path Without a Flag Day
- 04What they have in common - sent to subscribers only
Prefer to read at your own pace? Theproduction readiness checklist collects every check these incidents produced, on one page, free and ungated.
Past issues
Every issue is kept in thepublic archive, so you can read a few before deciding.
The small print
Monthly, sometimes a little less when work or family says otherwise. I would rather skip a month than pad one. Unsubscribe in one click, and the list is never shared or sold. If you would rather not hand over an email address at all, theRSS feed carries the full text of every post.