Sam Achebe

What Jot looks like from the inside

Jot hands a model the same Markdown you wrote instead of a scraped page. What that fixes, and the two places where the twin is thinner than the page.

Postmortem: 43 minutes of 502s and one very confident regex

Our gateway returned 502 for forty three minutes because of a regex I would have approved too. Full timeline, the pattern, and the dashboard that lied to me.

The cash was in the Philippines, allegedly

Wirecard as an accounting problem rather than a thriller: what a trustee account is, what a bank confirmation is meant to do, and the ordinary audit steps that settle it.

Null Island has a weather station

0,0 is three kilometres of open water in the Gulf of Guinea and the busiest coordinate on Earth. Why zero and nothing keep collapsing into each other.

I made garum for six months

Roman fish sauce in a bucket in Malmo, six months, 20 percent salt. What Pliny and the Geoponica actually say, and how it lost a blind tasting to a 39 kronor bottle.

Marcus Aurelius at four in the morning

How the Meditations read on a night shift. Book 5.1 is written for people who choose when their day starts. 8.36 is the one that gets me to five in the morning.

EXPLAIN ANALYZE has never lied to me

A support query that took 13.8 seconds, a report that timed out at 300, and a fix that turned out to be statistics rather than an index. Real plans, Postgres 18.2.

Limiting magnitude from first principles

Where the fifth root of 100 comes from, why 5 log D is just Pogson again, and why every aperture table you have seen is a point source table.

The on-call handover I have used for nine years

The plain text block I hand over with. Every field, why it is there, and the two I deleted, one of which I put in myself and should not have.