Platform Toolsmith

Six months after we standardized on OpenSearch, a pull request introduced Datadog into a service.

Archbot flagged a "blocker" on a PR.

Here's a story I tell my mentees often—and it's one where I almost made an expensive mistake.

You don’t “need retries in Kafka” until the day one of your handlers starts failing and you’re forced into a choice: block consumption (and watch lag climb) or keep consuming and retry somewhere else.

[ TIP ] A Note from the Future (2026) While writing this third part, I realized the original posts in this series needed a refresh to match the depth we're hitting here.

Two weeks after deploying our custom AI code reviewer, it caught a bug that would have crashed our payment processing.

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