Prabal Tripathi
What I'd Tell Myself in First Year
Not the usual advice. The four things that actually would have changed something.
Deleting Code Is the Job
The best pull request I shipped this quarter had a negative line count.
Flaky Is Not Random
Calling a test flaky is a diagnosis, and it's almost always the wrong one.
The Cat Question, Revisited
I went to the shelter. I did not come back with a cat.
eBPF, Explained to Me by Me
Running your code inside the kernel, safely — written down until I understood it.
Things I Googled This Week
An unedited list, including the embarrassing ones, and what it says about expertise.
Record, Replay, and the Lie of a Stable World
Capturing real traffic to use as tests is a wonderful idea with one hard assumption underneath.
Imposter, Measured
I kept a log of every time I felt out of my depth, and the pattern surprised me.
OOM at Three in the Morning
A service kept getting killed. The query was correct, the index was fine, and the data had simply grown.
The Walk Without the Phone
Forty minutes, no device, and the first twenty are genuinely unpleasant.
git log -S Is a Time Machine
The git command I reach for most, and the question it answers that nothing else does.
Sleep Is a Feature
I tracked the correlation between sleep and the quality of my work, and the result was annoying.
Virtual Lists Break Your Tests
A rendering optimisation that is invisible to users and devastating to a test suite.
Chai, Twice
Two cups a day, and why the second one is not about the chai.
It Works on My Machine, and That's the Bug
The phrase is a joke. It's also a precise and useful piece of information.
I Film Things I Never Post
Three hundred clips, and what I learned from not publishing them.
What an Init Container Is Actually For
A container whose entire job is to run and exit — and the ordering problem it solves.
The Rain Comes at Four
On living somewhere with a weather schedule.
Two Thousand Six Hundred and Seventy-Nine Apps
A test created one record and never deleted it. Then it ran for a year.
On Not Finishing Books
I abandon most books I start, and I've decided this is fine.
The Test That Only Fails in Someone Else's PR
The most valuable test in a codebase is the one that breaks for a stranger.
Six Chords and No Excuse
I've been bad at guitar for years, and I finally worked out why.
Credentials That Rot
Two ways to prove who you are, and why one of them quietly expires on you.
How a Tuesday Actually Goes
An honest timesheet, including the parts that don't look like work.
A Mocked Test Is a Promise to Yourself
On end-to-end tests that fake the backend, and why they can never fail usefully.
Today I Noticed the Lift Mirror
Why there's a mirror in the lift, and what it fixed.
Read the Log First
The cheapest debugging technique I know, and the one I skip most.
I Want a Cat, But
An ongoing negotiation with myself about a small animal I do not own.
The Five-Week Red Pipeline
A build stayed broken for over a month. The interesting part wasn't the bug — it was why nobody found it.