CatOps

Another book bundle on HumbleBundle. This one is about software architecture. Hopefully, you’d find something interesting there.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/software-architecture-apress-books

#books

Plantescale (a database company) released an article about sharding.

It doesn't go into deep technical details. Also, it's a pity that they did not touch on some operational aspects of sharded storages: how to back up those systems, replication, etc. On another hand, because of this the article is brief and easy to follow.

It may be useful for your system design interviews out there, because it is high level and it mentions some existing out-of-the-box solutions.

P.S. It also has some very nice animations!

#databases

From all the management blogs, stories from Mike Fisher always resonate with me somehow. At least, those stories that get to me.

You Can’t Fake Belonging is a story of that feeling that is hard to put into words, but that greatly defines if your job is an interesting journey or a soul crushing routine.

From the first few paragraphs, I assumed that this would be yet another "office good" article, but it isn't! Let him cook and hopefully, this article would be insightful for you as well!

What I especially liked about it is the description of the manager's role. I guess everyone can name a good and a bad manager they had in the past, but it's not always clear why one of them was good and another one - bad. Also, the last bit hits hard: "The most dangerous person on your team isn’t the loudest critic or the lowest performer. It’s the one who has quietly decided they don’t belong here, started to believe it, and hasn’t left yet."

#culture #mgmt

​​We continue with a fundraiser a pickup truck for the 423rd battalion.

Right now, one jar has 218/350k raised, and the other one 32/50k.

Jar 1:

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/2aMqtZT592

Jar 2:

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/8oTyqJUjPV

#donations #Ukraine

I often post book bundles on this channel, but buying books and reading books are two different hobbies.

Here’s a book list on Github with software engineering books selected by a set of criteria:

- The book must be relevant to Software Architecture; and
- The content is not obsolete.
- It must be technology agnostic or applicable to a wide range of technologies;
- An average rating of 3.5 or above; and
- A total number of ratings equals 50 or above.
- At least 5 written reviews.
- A minimum length of 50 pages.

Hopefully, it could help you to find what to actually read.

#books

Rewriting everything in Rust was a meme of itself before the wide application of AI. However, Rewriting Bun in Rust is interesting precisely because of AI.

Quoting the article itself:

Pre-merge, this took 5.9 billion uncached input tokens, 690 million output tokens, and 72 billion cached input token reads — around $165,000 at API pricing. By hand, I think this would've taken 3 engineers with full context on the codebase about a year, during which time we wouldn't be able to improve Node.js compatibility, fix bugs, fix security issues or implement new features. We never would've done that. The realistic alternative was to do nothing and keep fixing the bugs at the top of this post forever.

What’s interesting in this article, regardless of whether or not you plan to rewrite a huge code base, is how he approached the task with multiple agents. This is something you could do in your daily job for smaller things as well.

Bun v1.4.0 is the first Rust version, and some companies already use it in production.

#ai #programming #rust

Multi-Agent System Reliability is an article by Alex Ewerlöf that touches on some practical aspects of working with agentic AI systems day-to-day.

It covers patterns you can use to improve the output, and probably the main point:

> stop treating LLMs like magic chatbots. Start treating them like unreliable components in a distributed system.

#ai #sre

​​My friend raises money for a pickup truck for the 423rd battalion.

Right now, there are 200 out of 350 k UAH raised.

You can donate on a supportive jar:

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/2aMqtZT592

Or on her jar:

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/8oTyqJUjPV

#donations #Ukraine

A new issue of the CatOps Digest is here!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2026-07-11

#digest #newsletter

Some book bundles on Humble Bundle:

- AI usage and practices
- Linux things

Just remember to always check, if you have the books already, because these bundles repeat from time to time.

#books

Yesterday Flux turned 10 years old! 🎉

In this article they reflect on this journey and recall some pivotal moments from the past. Plus, highlight what are they doing now.

P.S. Do not forget to update your CV 😁

#kubernetes #gitops #flux

A post from Cloudflare about a low-level race condition they tracked down and fixed in the Rust Hyper library.

I like reading such detective stories. Also, I recall times, when people would regularly ask about strace on the interviews. I am not sure if this is still the case. At least, I wasn’t asked about strace for a long time.

#programming #postmortem

Finally, easy AWS EKS rollbacks to previous K8s version!

Now you can trust EKS upgrade even to your AI agent (please don't)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/upgrade-amazon-eks-clusters-with-confidence-using-kubernetes-version-rollbacks/

#kubernetes #eks #aws

The four horsemen behind thousands of Postgres outages is a self-promotion article, but it can teach you some things about Postgres, so I allow it.

A few corrections, though. Postgres does have a pg_hint_plan extension that allows you to modify the plan yourself. However, if you need to use that, there may be something odd with your queries in the first place.

The second thing is JSON. Postgres works with it and a lot of people use JSON fields, but this database was not created for JSON in the first place. So, if you need to work mostly with JSON, you would probably be better with another storage, or you could deserialize JSON fields into columns and work with data as usual.

#databases

Term “gateway” is super-widespread in the Kubernetes world. One of the recent additions is, of course, the AI Gateway. But what is that? Obviously, a reverse proxy, but what else?

This article aims to answer this question. The most important part here is that it doesn’t try to tell you what gateway is the best, but rather outlines subtle differences between the flavors. So, you could choose responsibly, if you need such a gateway.

#ai #kubernetes

​​A big fundraiser from DOU for the 2nd separate corps of the National Guard of Ukraine «Хартія» is still ongoing.

The goal of this fundraiser is to buy heavy bomber drones "Vampire" for the Kupiansk direction.

Monobank jar: https://send.monobank.ua/jar/26mrQPQ3PZ

#donations #Ukraine

Save a list of Kubernetes defaults in one place, so you don't forget, and don't need to find them every time.

#kubernetes

​​An article about optimizing the symbolicator - the part of the observability stack that translates stack traces of minified code into human-readable ones.

It’s an interesting read about what a design optimization can achieve. In the discussion on Reddit, commentators rightfully pointed out that the drastic difference between this new symbolicator and the baseline is due to the approach that author uses, and that a C/Rust version would still perform batter compared to the example in Go. Yet, this is kinda the point: by designing your application in a clever way, you can achieve better performance with “slower” technologies compared to brute-forcing the solution using “faster” technologies.

#programming

Not all index scans are equal is an article by Datadog, where they describe the idea of targeted DB indices and when to use those.

There is also some praise for their database monitoring tooling, but this is a vendor article after all.

The only thing is that they didn't mention that too many indices also comes with a price: you need to store and update them. So, always evaluate the performance for some period of time after adding indices.

#databases #observability

We continue supporting DOU with their fundraiser for the 2nd separate corps of the National Guard of Ukraine «Хартія». The goal of this fundraiser is to buy heavy bomber drones "Vampire" for the Kupiansk direction.

Monobank jar: https://send.monobank.ua/jar/26mrQPQ3PZ

#donations #Ukraine