9 min read
Retry With Backoff and Jitter: The Version I Copy Everywhere
Naive retries hammer a recovering server and turn blips into outages
The Lab · Written in the open · Tagged Backend
Lab.
Working notes from the studio. The tools I build, the workflows I keep, the mistakes I paid for.
7 entries · latest 2026-10-21
Latest entry
Scheduled Jobs and Time Zones: The Midnight Bug I Keep Seeing
Cron runs in UTC by default, so a "midnight" job can fire on the wrong local day Define the business day explicitly with a timezone string, never a UTC offset DST shifts your offset twice a year, which silently moves...
Read the entry
Latest entry · Tutorials
All entries · Backend
8 min read
Request Validation at the Edge: A Minimal Pattern I Reuse
Reject bad requests at the edge before they touch real logic or a database
9 min read
Structured Logging I Add on Day One of Every Project
Three fields on every log line: request_id, event, context object with actual values
9 min read
Writing Idempotent Webhooks: Patterns That Survive Retries
Every webhook arrives twice eventually, so design for it from day one
10 min read
Rate Limiting Without Redis: 3 Patterns I Use in Serverless
Durable counters give exact limits but cost per request
8 min read
Hono: The Tiny Framework That Runs My Entire Backend
Hono ships under 14KB and runs the same code on Bun, Node, Deno, Cloudflare Workers, and Vercel Edge