Top all-time · #2395
Stories by Cindy Sridharan on Medium
Personal blog · copyconstruct.medium.comprogrammingsystems
Stories by Cindy Sridharan on Medium is a personal blog at copyconstruct.medium.com about programming and systems. Since 2020, 31 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times, most often “Small functions considered harmful”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Small functions considered harmful5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-03-02
- Why Success Is Often Elusive at the Highest Echelons4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-04-25
- Testing in Production: The Safe Way4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-03-30
- How to effectively debug when you no longer understand the code3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-10-12
- Testing microservices, the sane way3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-02-23
- Know how your org works, or how to become a more effective engineer2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-01-05
- Socat – A utility for data transfer between two addresses (2018)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-03-25
- Monitoring and Observability (2017)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-11
What Hacker News says?
Cindy Sridharan often writes well about these topics. https://copyconstruct.medium.com/testing-in-production-the-s... For this one I'd start about half way down, under the heading "Shadowing (also known as Dark Traffic Testing or Mirroring)" Unfortunately the terminology is a bit fragmented - shadowing, mirroring, teeing, dark traffic (ick), ad nauseam. Whatever you call it, it's often pretty high overhead to add th…
Comment linking /testing-in-production-the-safe-way-18ca102d0ef1
on “Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?”Submitted Socat – A utility for data transfer between two addresses (2018) as a story · 230 points
HN discussionObservability is not just about traces. This great article[1] by @copyconstruct describes it in detail, and lists monitoring, alerting/visualization, tracing, and log aggregation/analytics as key components of an observability stack. [1] https://copyconstruct.medium.com/monitoring-and-observabilit...
Comment linking /monitoring-and-observability-8417d1952e1c
on “Postgres Observability”Submitted File Descriptor Transfer over Unix Domain Sockets as a story · 117 points
HN discussionThis is quaint and wholesome. I long for the simpler days when I could agree with this, blissful in my naivety of large scale organizations. Nowadays, I accept this reality is largely impossible and you must always draw some boundary. This doesn't mean all your developers should use a shared MySQL because nobody knows how to bootstrap the database- but it means you have to consciously decide where you sit on the con…
Comment linking /testing-microservices-the-sane-way-9bb31d158c16
on “You need to be able to run your system”Submitted Know how your org works, or how to become a more effective engineer as a story · 110 points
HN discussionThis is certainly true for blocking code reviews. I'm interested in exploring the alternative, which is review-after-commit. There's an article describing those here: https://copyconstruct.medium.com/post-commit-reviews-b4cc216... Code still gets reviewed, but you don't end up with PRs languishing for hours, days or even weeks waiting to get a review from someone.
Comment linking /post-commit-reviews-b4cc2163ac7a
on “Code reviews do find bugs”Submitted Seamless file descriptor transfer between processes with pidfd and pidfd_getfd as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAs others have said already, that's nowhere near enough. In general, I advise my teams to stay away from any Open Source projects that don't have a robust testing approach. Toby Clemson's infodeck on Martin Fowler's site has a lot of information about testing microservices: https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservice-testing/ "Testing in production" doesn't necessarily mean "Test only in production". Cindy Sridha…
Comment linking /testing-in-production-the-safe-way-18ca102d0ef1
on “Real World Micro Services”- ot · 2026-10-16
Submitted How to effectively debug when you no longer understand the code as a story · 2 points
HN discussion Check out https://copyconstruct.medium.com/testing-in-production-the-s... Basically, preprod and any not-prod environments cannot ultimately perfectly reproduce prod, and in a sufficiently complex system, the failure states cannot be predicted in a replicated environment. Instead, using strategies like rolling deployments, you can test on the actual environment you want to validate. If set up properly, it doesn't re…
Comment linking /testing-in-production-the-safe-way-18ca102d0ef1
on “Stop mocking your system”Submitted How to effectively debug when you no longer understand the code as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSome links you may find useful https://copyconstruct.medium.com/small-functions-considered-... https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
Comment linking /small-functions-considered-harmful-91035d316c29
on “I Have a Dirty Secret. I’m a Software Craftsman”Submitted Small functions considered harmful as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Vendors can change schemas on a dime and the schema you're working with is often the schema as you know it at the time. This is partially negated through aggressive dependency management and languages with type systems and vendor provided interfaces. This is why testing in production is so important. Building monitoring and alerting tools, making code observable for all of that to be feasible, and building an inci…
Comment linking /testing-in-production-the-hard-parts-3f06cefaf592
on “Test Against Reality”Submitted Socat – A utility for data transfer between two addresses as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Know how your org works (or how to become a more effective engineer) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Success Is Often Elusive at the Highest Echelons as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Best of 2021 in Tech Talks as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Best of 2020 in Tech [Talks] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Cluster Schedulers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to effectively debug when you no longer understand the code as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Small Functions Considered Harmful as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Success Is Often Elusive at the Highest Echelons (2022) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Success Is Often Elusive at the Highest Echelons (2022) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Monitoring and Observability (2017) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Small Functions Considered Harmful (2017) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Testing Microservices the Sane Way as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Success Is Often Elusive at the Highest Echelons as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Success Is Often Elusive at the Highest Echelons as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
