Technical Blog

Longer, narrative posts about specific engineering decisions behind the platform — the kind of thing that doesn't fit in a reference page.

• Circuit breakers for external services
  May 22, 2026

  Stopping cascading failures when payment, shipping, or tax services go dark.

• Tracing a memory leak in Solid Queue workers
  May 21, 2026

  Where the leak came from and how we measured the fix.

• Why we paginate with cursors, not page numbers
  May 20, 2026

  Offset pagination gets slower the deeper you scroll and shows shoppers duplicates. Keyset pagination fixes both.

• Shipping web push with VAPID
  May 19, 2026

  Browser push notifications for the blog without a third-party SDK.

• Designing OTPs that survive a stampede
  May 18, 2026

  Resend throttling, idempotent generation, and queue back-pressure for SMS/email OTPs.

• Observing the Rails cache in production
  May 17, 2026

  Hit-rate, eviction signals, and what to alert on.

• Infinite scroll without breaking the back button
  May 16, 2026

  Stimulus + IntersectionObserver, with cursor pagination underneath.

• How wishlist sharing actually works
  May 15, 2026

  Turning a private list into a shareable, collaborative object — and keeping the public surface to exactly one endpoint.

• A taxonomy of error handling in a Rails monolith
  May 14, 2026

  What to rescue, where, and when to fail loudly.

• Designing a fail-open Redis layer
  May 10, 2026

  Redis makes the store fast. The work was making sure it could never make the store down.