It was 2:47 AM when the alerts started. A seemingly straightforward database migration had triggered a cascading failure across three downstream services, and our payment processing pipeline was dropping roughly 12% of transactions. The on-call engineer didn't need to wake anyone, locate a rollback script, or wait for a CI pipeline to churn through another deploy. She opened the LaunchDarkly dashb
I am a first-year CS student and I recently made a decision that most people around me think is unnecessary — I am building a relational database storage engine from scratch in raw C++, with zero STL dependency. No std::vector. No std::string. No iostream. Nothing. The Problem With How I Was Learning For a long time I was writing code that worked but I had no idea why it worked. I used abstraction