Debugging Production Incidents in 2026 — A Senior Engineer's Working Loop
Practical incident debugging: observe → hypothesize → test → narrow. Tools (logs, metrics, traces, profiles), playbooks, and what to avoid mid-incident.
DevOps
Blue/Green vs Canary vs Rolling Deploys in 2026 — Which to Pick
Deploy strategy selection: rolling for default, canary for risk-sensitive, blue/green for stateful / instant cutover. Tools and patterns from production.
Load Testing in 2026 — k6, Vegeta, Locust, and Tests That Predict Production
Practical load testing: pick the right tool, model real traffic, find capacity ceilings, integrate into CI, and avoid common pitfalls.
Argo Workflows in 2026 — Pipelines on Kubernetes That Actually Work
Practical Argo Workflows: DAG vs steps, parameters, artifacts, retries, when Argo wins over Airflow / Prefect, and operational realities.
Edge Compute in 2026 — Cloudflare Workers, Vercel, Deno Deploy, and What's Real
Practical edge compute: where edge actually wins (latency, bot mitigation, A/B), platform limits, cold starts, data locality, and when to stay regional.
Observability Cost Control in 2026 — Cardinality, Sampling, and the Bills That Surprise You
Practical observability cost cuts: cardinality discipline, log sampling, trace tail-sampling, retention tiers, and self-hosting tradeoffs.
Kubernetes Resource Limits in 2026 — CPU, Memory, and the Cost of Getting It Wrong
Practical K8s resource sizing: requests and limits, OOMKill and CPU throttling, VPA / Goldilocks for sizing, QoS classes, and avoiding noisy neighbors.
Docker Best Practices in 2026 — Slim Images, Layer Caching, and the Patterns That Ship
Practical Docker: multi-stage builds, distroless / Alpine vs slim, BuildKit cache mounts, signing, scanning, and shipping small fast secure images.
SLOs and Error Budgets in 2026 — The Discipline That Replaces 'Nines'
Practical SLO design: pick SLIs that matter, set realistic targets, define error budgets, alert on burn rate, and make the budget drive engineering tradeoffs.
Terraform vs Pulumi vs OpenTofu in 2026 — The IaC Choice Explained
IaC tool selection: Terraform’s BSL impact, OpenTofu as the OSS fork, Pulumi for full programming languages, and where each fits in 2026.