• API Resilience Patterns

  Pattern #3: Circuit Breaker design pattern

  Apr 9, 2026• API Resilience Patterns Code Patterns

  A circuit breaker was not the first thing we wrote for our HTTP requests. It took us several years, before we clearly saw the benefits we could reap.

• Why do smart devs write silly code?

  Exhibit C: It'll Take Two Weeks, Tops

  Mar 23, 2026• Cognitive Biases in Code Engineering Research

  The previous chapters covered anchoring bias and confirmation bias. This chapter is dedicated to optimism bias: the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of positive events and underestimate that of negative...

• API Resilience Patterns

  Pattern #2: Retrying Celery Tasks from Page 47

  Feb 24, 2026• API Resilience Patterns Code Patterns Celery

  You’re syncing 5,000 records from GitHub. Your Celery task is on page 12 when the API says “429 - slow down” (you are rate-limited). The task fails. If you’ve thought...

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Engineering Research

Posts that draw from research papers

• Why do smart devs write silly code?

  Exhibit B: I Just Need to Confirm Something (But I'm Pretty Sure I'm Right)

  Jul 23, 2025

  The previous chapter was all about anchoring bias, which makes us cling to the first idea we come across. This...

• Why do smart devs write silly code?

  Exhibit A: Because Writing a Fresh Query Is Too Much Work

  Jul 21, 2025

  It works on my machine.

• The Interview Process isn't broken, it is intolerant by design

  Jun 10, 2021

  At the moment, the IT industry is considered a pretty prestigious profession. It attracts lots and lots of people because...

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People

...in the world of IT

• Why do Developers Argue so Much? Code Hard, Argue Harder

  Mar 31, 2025

  So, have you also noticed that developers have a certain … fondness for arguing?

• What is the most sought-after trait of a developer?

  Feb 9, 2025

  This is so easy to answer! This post doesn’t even need more than just an intro.

• Opinion: In Defence of Hierarchical Command Structures

  Jan 31, 2025

  Developers. Aren’t we just a most … argumentative bunch of … people? We fight on pull requests, we fight on...

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Code Patterns

• API Resilience Patterns

  Pattern #1: Caching Rate Limits (in Redis)

  Feb 6, 2026

  This might come as a surprise, but sooner or later your call to some external API will get rate-limited.

• Building Blocks Collection

  What to do when a DB transaction fails? Retry it ♻️

  Jan 12, 2025

  What do a good portion of database transactions do? They fail. But this is hardly surprising.

• Building Blocks Collection

  Build me a global user_id / request_id / tenant_id

  Jan 3, 2025

  Sometimes you want to have a globally accessible function like get_current_user() that somehow magically stores the current user for the...

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