Challenges with distributed systems

Jacob Gabrielson about the challenges of distributed systems at Amazon. He comes up with failures modes inherent in all distributes systems, and calls them the eight failure modes of the apocalypse. Engineering distributed systems is hard, being cognizant about all failure modes helps by providing some structure to tackling the problem.

Rails has added strict loading mode to prevent lazy loading

Rohit Kumar points out that Rails 6.1 will add strict loading support. With it turned on, Rails will raise an error instead of allowing association lazy loading. I welcome this change. Lazy loading seems like a feature that speeds up development in Rails, but is the cause of N+1 queries. I have yet to work on Rails app that doesn’t have performance issues because of this.

On recursive queries

Egor Rogov gives an overview of the recursive syntax in SQL, and walks through a step-by-step example of how to write a useful, performant recursive query, that solves a realistic business-logic example.