Field notes
Short essays from the cohort floor.
These notes are written by the studio team after a cohort or a workshop. Most are short — five or six minutes — and most are honest about what was difficult, what worked, and what we would do differently in the next intake.
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21 Apr 2026 · 6 min read
Reading Autovacuum Like a Quiet Letter
Most operators learn autovacuum as a list of parameters. Here is the small mental model we use in our cohorts to read it as a conversation between the planner and the storage layer.
PostgreSQL Operations Autovacuum Read → -
10 Mar 2026 · 5 min read
A Backup Is Just an Opinion Until It Restores
A short essay on why we treat backup verification as the first deliverable of any new operations engagement, and how to introduce it without making the team feel audited.
Backup Recovery Practice Read → -
17 Feb 2026 · 5 min read
gh-ost in a Mid-Volume Estate
Notes from a recent corporate cohort on introducing gh-ost-style online schema changes into a team that had been doing them by hand for years.
MySQL gh-ost Cohort notes Read → -
29 Jan 2026 · 4 min read
Setting Tempo on an Incident Bridge
A short field note on the small leadership move that turns a chaotic bridge into a working investigation: deliberately slowing down for sixty seconds.
Incident response Leadership Practice Read → -
8 Dec 2025 · 6 min read
EXPLAIN, but Slowly
A recurring observation from our Performance Tuning cohort: most operators read EXPLAIN output too fast. Here is the slower habit we teach instead.
Performance EXPLAIN Habits Read →