Archive
All #Bengineering Posts
A full timeline of practical engineering notes from Benjamin Cane.
43 posts
August 8, 2025 → June 4, 2026
- June 4, 2026 Most teams put low-level architecture in the wrong place
- May 28, 2026 Your coding agent is missing one thing: architectural context
- May 21, 2026 Health-check the listener your gRPC traffic actually uses
- May 14, 2026 Weighted load balancing has saved me more times than I can count
- May 7, 2026 YOLO Is a Terrible Strategy for Validating Production Changes
- April 30, 2026 Deterministic routing is one of the most effective ways distributed systems reduce consistency problems at scale
- April 23, 2026 When you think of microservices, you probably think of centralized shared services. But there's another valid pattern that is rarely discussed
- April 16, 2026 Are you using traffic mirroring in production? If not, try it out.
- April 9, 2026 Agent Skills Are Becoming the Best Way to Capture Institutional Knowledge
- April 2, 2026 Saved Prompts Are Dead. Agent Skills Are the Future.
- March 26, 2026 Generating Code Faster Is Only Valuable If You Can Validate Every Change With Confidence
- March 19, 2026 When You Go to Production with gRPC, Make Sure You’ve Solved Load Distribution First
- March 12, 2026 You may be building for availability, but are you building for resiliency?
- March 5, 2026 When your coding agent doesn’t understand your project, you’ll get junk
- February 26, 2026 You can have 100% Code Coverage and still have ticking time bombs in your code. 💣
- February 19, 2026 Getting More Out of Agentic Coding Tools
- February 12, 2026 Why is Infrastructure-as-Code so important? Hint: It's correctness
- February 5, 2026 Optimizing the team’s workflow can be more impactful than building business features
- January 29, 2026 I follow an architecture principle I call The Law of Collective Amnesia
- January 22, 2026 Performance testing without a target is like running a race with no finish line
- January 15, 2026 Many teams think performance testing means throwing traffic at a system until it breaks. That approach is fine, but it misses how systems are actually stressed in the real world.
- January 8, 2026 Pre-populating caches is a “bolt-on” cache-optimization I've used successfully in many systems. It works, but it adds complexity
- January 1, 2026 Don't be afraid to build a tool. Just don't become too attached to it.
- December 26, 2025 One of the toughest engineering skills to develop is accepting a decision you disagree with. 😖
- December 19, 2025 Canary deployments are an operational superpower, but the complexity they bring isn’t for everyone.
- December 12, 2025 Everyone has bias, yes, even you. 🫵
- December 5, 2025 Do you use Architecture Decision Records? I’m a big fan, and I think they’re a best practice every engineering org should adopt.
- November 28, 2025 Does resource usage within your application or database suddenly spike periodically? Does it cause system slowdown?
- November 21, 2025 When you shut down an application instance, don't stop the listener immediately — that's how you end up with failed requests during every application rollout. 😢
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November 14, 2025
A common issue I see when teams first adopt
gRPCis managing persistent connections, especially during failovers. - November 7, 2025 A dangerous mindset I’ve seen—and been guilty of—is assuming code doesn't change.
- October 31, 2025 ⚡️Does saving 1 millisecond really matter? Answer: more than you’d think.
- October 27, 2025 Have you heard of Store and Forward? It’s a resiliency design prevalent in card & bank payments, telecommunications, and other industries.
- October 24, 2025 When Building Low-Latency, High-Scale Systems, Push as Much Processing as Possible to Later
- October 10, 2025 Coding is a small part of software engineering.
- October 3, 2025 Should I be an individual contributor or a people leader?
- September 26, 2025 Improve performance and reduce chances of request failures with this one simple trick! Avoid cross-region calls.
- September 19, 2025 Did you know Kube-proxy doesn’t perform load-balancing itself? It’s iptables (by default).
- September 12, 2025 You’ve heard of feature flags, but what about operational flags? ⏯️
- September 5, 2025 A core capability for building low-latency platforms is quickly detecting and reacting to issues.
- August 22, 2025 Sometimes when I tell people that logging can impact a microservices response time, I get strange looks. 🤨
- August 15, 2025 How many times have you seen analytics on an operational database create issues? I’ve seen it far too often.
- August 8, 2025 I can't count how often I've seen issues made worse by minor oversights—like not setting a timeout value. ⏱️