Kalvexor
Long-form technical notes, written by operators for operators.
What Good Observability Actually Looks Like
April 29, 2026
Dashboards multiply like rabbits and answer questions nobody asked this month. Good observability starts from the opposite direction: the alert fired, a human is awake, and the tooling should answer 'what changed' within a minute.
In practice that means a small set of high-cardinality traces on the request path, deployment markers on every graph that matters, and logs structured enough that you can pivot from a customer ID to a timeline without five grep commands.
Structuring DNS for Reliability
July 8, 2026
Domain resolution outages produce an awkward paradox: server instances remain perfectly healthy while clients perceive complete downtime. Insulating against platform-level registrar outages demands secondary authoritative DNS providers operating over separate routing infrastructure.…
Email Deliverability: Authentication Beyond SPF
June 17, 2026
Relying strictly on SPF validation is long obsolete. Outbound mail can easily pass envelope checks while failing domain alignment, prompting modern receiving systems to evaluate cryptographic DKIM signatures and strict DMARC enforcement instead.…
Practical Notes on Postgres Connection Pooling
July 1, 2026
Each incoming PostgreSQL connection instantiates an isolated operating system process with dedicated memory overhead, necessitating a dedicated pooling proxy in growing deployments. Classic session pooling acts transparently, whereas high-throughput transaction pooling frequently disrupts stateful f…
The Hidden Cost of Chatty Microservices
September 8, 2026
Decomposing monolithic applications substitutes in-memory execution paths with network boundaries, creating massive fan-out overhead. Where an operation once invoked three internal functions, it now executes three network dispatches across distinct services, multiplying timeout policies and failure …
More reading
- Cache Invalidation Patterns That Survive Traffic — Data, August 30, 2026
- Zero-Downtime Deployments Without the Drama — Operations, August 9, 2026
- Managing Secrets Without Losing Sleep — Security, June 14, 2026
About us
We are a small team of infrastructure engineers and technical writers. We publish what we learn running production systems: incident retrospectives, protocol deep-dives and tooling notes.