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.
Reliability
Circuit Breakers in 2026 — Patterns, Pitfalls, and When They Save You
Practical circuit breakers: the closed/open/half-open state machine, threshold tuning, fallback strategies, libraries (resilience4j, py-breaker), and where breakers go wrong.
LLM Agent Error Recovery in 2026 — Patterns That Don't Loop Forever
Production agent error handling. Per-tool retries vs whole-agent retries, fallback paths, step caps, escalation, human-in-the-loop, and the patterns from real agent deployments.
Chaos Engineering in 2026 — Game Days That Actually Find Bugs
Chaos engineering done right. Game days, failure injection (Chaos Mesh, Gremlin), what to test, the observability needed, and the cultural shifts that make it stick.
Health Checks That Don't Lie — Liveness, Readiness, and Startup Probes in 2026
Why most health checks lie, the difference between liveness and readiness, dependency-aware checks, startup probes for slow boots, and the patterns that surface real problems.
Temporal and Durable Execution in 2026 — The Reliability Layer
Durable execution explained. Why Temporal became standard infrastructure in 2026, when to reach for it, and concrete patterns for AI agents, payment workflows, sagas, and any long-running process that must survive crashes.
Idempotency, Retries, and the Exactly-Once Illusion
Production patterns for idempotency keys, retry strategies, the outbox pattern, and the truth about exactly-once delivery. The patterns every backend engineer needs to handle network failure correctly.
SLOs and Error Budgets for App Developers — SRE Without the Mystique
A short, practical guide to SLOs and error budgets for application developers. Choose the right SLI, pick targets you can actually defend, calculate the budget, and use it to drive feature-velocity vs. reliability tradeoffs.