architecture Reinforcing vs. Balancing Feedback Loops: Why Retries Can Make an Outage Worse josedacruz, August 3, 2026August 3, 2026 You get paged at 2am. A payment service is running slow. You watch the dashboard, and something strange happens: the more you look at it, the worse it gets. Error rates climb. Latency climbs. Then, ten minutes after the first alert, the whole checkout system goes down — not because… Continue Reading
architecture How Instagram-Style Feeds Work: Fan-Out on Write vs. Fan-Out on Read josedacruz, August 2, 2026August 2, 2026 Imagine you’re on the backend team at a small photo-sharing app called Snapstream. Every user has a home feed: a scrolling list of photos from the people they follow, newest first. For your first 10,000 users, this is easy. For your next 10 million, it turns into one of the… Continue Reading
architecture The Strangler Fig Pattern: How to Replace a Legacy System Without a Big-Bang Rewrite josedacruz, July 30, 2026July 30, 2026 Every few years, a team decides their old system is too messy to keep working with, and someone says the magic words: “Let’s just rewrite it from scratch.” Six months later, the rewrite still isn’t done, the old system still has bugs nobody is fixing because “we’re replacing it soon… Continue Reading
architecture Conway’s Law in the Wild: Why Your Microservices Look Suspiciously Like Your Org Chart josedacruz, July 29, 2026 Here’s a strange but reliable pattern: if you look at the architecture diagram of almost any mid-size tech company, you can guess how their org chart is drawn. Not because someone planned it that way. It just… happens. This pattern has a name: Conway’s Law. It was named after Melvin… Continue Reading
architecture Feature Flags as a Deployment Strategy: Deploy Dark, Release When Ready | ★ Bonus Episode josedacruz, May 23, 2026May 23, 2026 Most deployment strategies tie the moment of shipping code to the moment of releasing a feature. Feature flags break that assumption entirely. With feature flags, you deploy code to production in an inactive state — hidden behind a conditional check. The code is live on the server, but no user… Continue Reading
architecture Shadow Deployment: Mirror Live Traffic With Zero User Impact — The Most Advanced Strategy | Deployment Strategies #6 josedacruz, May 18, 2026May 18, 2026 What if you could run your new version against 100% of real production traffic — without a single user ever seeing it? Shadow deployment makes that possible, and it’s the most powerful production validation technique that most teams have never heard of. In this final episode, we cover the full… Continue Reading
architecture A/B Testing Deployment: Route by User Segment, Ship What Actually Works | Deployment Strategies #5 josedacruz, May 17, 2026May 17, 2026 Canary deployments ask “is v2 technically healthy?” — A/B testing asks a completely different question: “which version actually makes users convert, stay longer, and spend more?” In this video, we go deep on A/B testing as a deployment strategy: how rule-based routing works (by country, plan tier, device type, signup… Continue Reading
architecture Canary Release Explained: Deploy to 5% of Users First josedacruz, May 16, 2026May 16, 2026 What if you could catch production bugs before they hit 100% of your users — using real traffic, not synthetic tests? That’s exactly what Canary releases do. In this video, we break down the canary deployment strategy: how you route a small percentage of live traffic to the new version,… Continue Reading
architecture Top 5 AI Books for 2026: Best Books to Understand AI, Work, Jobs, and Business josedacruz, April 30, 2026April 30, 2026 Top 5 AI Books for 2026: Best Books to Understand AI, Work, Jobs, and Business Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant technology trend. In 2026, AI is becoming part of daily work, business strategy, hiring, education, creativity, customer service, and decision-making. The real question is no longer “Will AI… Continue Reading
architecture Blue/Green Deployment: Instant Rollback in 30 Seconds — How It Works | Deployment Strategies #3 josedacruz, April 14, 2026April 14, 2026 What if you could roll back a broken production deployment in 30 seconds? Blue/Green deployment makes that possible — and in this video, we explain exactly how. The idea is elegant: maintain two identical environments. Deploy to the idle one. Test it fully. Then flip a single load balancer rule… Continue Reading