Simple-dock
Long-form technical notes, written by operators for operators.
Managing Secrets Without Losing Sleep
September 11, 2026
Infrastructure teams generally experience two stages of secret maturity: storing variables in local encrypted repositories until an audit demands accountability. Crossing that divide entails rigorous credential turnover, verifiable access logs, and eliminating direct human access to runtime secrets.
Temporary access credentials minted via workload identity frameworks eclipse static api keys across every security vector. Though bootstrap attestation mechanisms differ across providers, the exchange pattern is identical: a cryptographically signed identity proof traded for temporary tokens expiring in minutes.
Practical Notes on Postgres Connection Pooling
September 5, 2026
Postgres connections are heavy - each backend carries megabytes of memory and a full process - so every scaled-out installation grows a pooler, and every pooler grows a dialect. Session pooling is nearly transparent; transaction pooling is fast and unforgiving, quietly breaking session features like…
What Good Observability Actually Looks Like
May 12, 2026
Unchecked dashboard proliferation creates visual noise without resolving production emergencies. Effective operational insight functions backward from triage: when an alert triggers and waking staff investigate, instrumentation must pinpoint modifications immediately.…
Why Edge Caching Still Matters in 2026
August 18, 2026
Every few years someone declares the edge cache obsolete: bandwidth is cheap, compute is fast, so why bother? Yet p99 latency keeps telling a different story. The round trip from a user in Sao Paulo to an origin in Frankfurt costs around 200 ms on a good day, and no amount of application optimisatio…
Data Residency Basics for Global Teams
August 28, 2026
Data residency questions arrive late in most projects, usually phrased as: can you just keep EU customer data in the EU? The honest answer is that 'just' is doing enormous work in that sentence, because residency is not a hosting decision but an architecture decision.…
More reading
- A Field Guide to Graceful Degradation — Engineering, May 26, 2026
- When to Choose a Queue Over a Request — Engineering, June 2, 2026
- Email Deliverability: Authentication Beyond SPF — Email, August 8, 2026
About us
Our contributors have spent years on-call for large platforms. This site collects the playbooks, postmortems and reference material we wish someone had handed us earlier.