Archive
All #Bengineering Posts
A full timeline of practical engineering notes from Benjamin Cane.
62 posts
August 8, 2025 → October 14, 2026
- October 14, 2026 Sometimes the biggest contributor to latency isn’t processing or network time. It’s waiting for work to start. performance
- October 7, 2026 System Design pro-tip: force yourself to create a viable second design. architecture
- September 30, 2026 One of my favorite aspects of gRPC isn’t the performance. It’s the well-defined contracts Protobuf provides. architecture
- September 23, 2026 Message queues are great for handing off work, but how do you know the work actually happens? reliability
- September 16, 2026 Some architecture principles should be rules. Others should be guidelines. architecture
- September 9, 2026 Mishandling concurrency is one of the most common root causes of software bugs reliability
- September 2, 2026 At what point does better performance stop being worth it? performance
- August 26, 2026 Sometimes good engineering looks like over-engineering reliability
- August 19, 2026 AI makes code cheap to create, not cheap to own agents
- August 13, 2026 “We can’t run locally” is usually a design smell engineering
- August 6, 2026 To make a service more stable, eliminate dependencies reliability
- July 30, 2026 Caching isn’t hard. Some data is hard to cache performance
- July 23, 2026 The closer to the edge, the more stable a platform must be reliability
- July 16, 2026 Sometimes the most resilient thing a system can do isn’t retry reliability
- July 9, 2026 Should retries and timeouts live in your application or your service mesh? reliability
- July 2, 2026 Need to migrate from one database to another without downtime? architecture
- June 25, 2026 Glue Services: Part Two — Data Synchronization architecture
- June 18, 2026 When modernizing legacy systems, don’t be afraid to build glue services architecture
- June 11, 2026 Coding agents can’t see your architecture diagrams—fix that architecture agents
- June 4, 2026 Most teams put low-level architecture in the wrong place architecture agents
- May 28, 2026 Your coding agent is missing one thing: architectural context agents
- May 21, 2026 Health-check the listener your gRPC traffic actually uses reliability
- May 14, 2026 Weighted load balancing has saved me more times than I can count performance
- May 7, 2026 YOLO Is a Terrible Strategy for Validating Production Changes reliability
- April 30, 2026 Deterministic routing is one of the most effective ways distributed systems reduce consistency problems at scale performance
- 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 architecture
- April 16, 2026 Are you using traffic mirroring in production? If not, try it out. reliability
- April 9, 2026 Agent Skills Are Becoming the Best Way to Capture Institutional Knowledge agents
- April 2, 2026 Saved Prompts Are Dead. Agent Skills Are the Future. agents
- March 26, 2026 Generating Code Faster Is Only Valuable If You Can Validate Every Change With Confidence agents
- March 19, 2026 When You Go to Production with gRPC, Make Sure You’ve Solved Load Distribution First reliability
- March 12, 2026 You may be building for availability, but are you building for resiliency? reliability
- March 5, 2026 When your coding agent doesn’t understand your project, you’ll get junk agents
- February 26, 2026 You can have 100% Code Coverage and still have ticking time bombs in your code. 💣 engineering
- February 19, 2026 Getting More Out of Agentic Coding Tools agents
- February 12, 2026 Why is Infrastructure-as-Code so important? Hint: It's correctness architecture
- February 5, 2026 Optimizing the team’s workflow can be more impactful than building business features engineering
- January 29, 2026 I follow an architecture principle I call The Law of Collective Amnesia architecture
- January 22, 2026 Performance testing without a target is like running a race with no finish line performance
- 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. performance
- 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 performance
- January 1, 2026 Don't be afraid to build a tool. Just don't become too attached to it. engineering
- December 26, 2025 One of the toughest engineering skills to develop is accepting a decision you disagree with. 😖 engineering
- December 19, 2025 Canary deployments are an operational superpower, but the complexity they bring isn’t for everyone. reliability
- December 12, 2025 Everyone has bias, yes, even you. 🫵 engineering
- 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. architecture
- November 28, 2025 Does resource usage within your application or database suddenly spike periodically? Does it cause system slowdown? reliability
- 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. 😢 reliability
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November 14, 2025
A common issue I see when teams first adopt
gRPCis managing persistent connections, especially during failovers. reliability - November 7, 2025 A dangerous mindset I’ve seen—and been guilty of—is assuming code doesn't change. engineering
- October 31, 2025 ⚡️Does saving 1 millisecond really matter? Answer: more than you’d think. performance
- October 27, 2025 Have you heard of Store and Forward? It’s a resiliency design prevalent in card & bank payments, telecommunications, and other industries. reliability
- October 24, 2025 When Building Low-Latency, High-Scale Systems, Push as Much Processing as Possible to Later performance
- October 10, 2025 Coding is a small part of software engineering. engineering
- October 3, 2025 Should I be an individual contributor or a people leader? engineering
- September 26, 2025 Improve performance and reduce chances of request failures with this one simple trick! Avoid cross-region calls. performance
- September 19, 2025 Did you know Kube-proxy doesn’t perform load-balancing itself? It’s iptables (by default). performance
- September 12, 2025 You’ve heard of feature flags, but what about operational flags? ⏯️ engineering
- September 5, 2025 A core capability for building low-latency platforms is quickly detecting and reacting to issues. reliability
- August 22, 2025 Sometimes when I tell people that logging can impact a microservices response time, I get strange looks. 🤨 performance
- August 15, 2025 How many times have you seen analytics on an operational database create issues? I’ve seen it far too often. performance
- August 8, 2025 I can't count how often I've seen issues made worse by minor oversights—like not setting a timeout value. ⏱️ reliability