Arsh Singhal’s Post

A single timeout misconfiguration once took down an entire system. No crashes. No error logs. Just latency — creeping up until everything stopped responding. Here's exactly what happened 👇 A downstream service started responding slowly. Not failing. Just... slow. And that made it worse. Our service kept waiting. Threads stayed blocked. Thread pool filled up. New requests started queuing. Within minutes — system-wide latency spike. Silent. Gradual. Devastating. 🔍 Root cause? No proper timeout + retry strategy on external calls. The tricky part — it worked perfectly in testing. Because testing environments have: ✅ Low traffic ✅ No real contention ✅ Fast, healthy dependencies Production has none of that. 🛠️ What actually fixed it: ⚙️ Strict timeouts — stop waiting on slow dependencies 🔌 Circuit breaker — cut off failing services before they cascade 🧱 Bulkhead isolation — protect critical flows from non-critical ones 🔄 Fallback responses — degrade gracefully instead of failing hard 💡 The real lesson: Failure is not binary. It doesn't go from working → broken. It goes working → slow → degraded → down. Most systems are built to handle the first and last state. Very few handle the middle. If you're building backend systems, stop asking: ❌ "Does this work?" Start asking: ✅ "What happens when this dependency slows down by 3x?" That one question separates a working system from a resilient one. The best engineers I've worked with don't just build for the happy path. They build for the slow, ugly, partial-failure path. That's where real system design lives. ♻️ Repost if your team needs to hear this. #SystemDesign #BackendEngineering #Microservices #Resilience #SpringBoot #DistributedSystems #SoftwareDevelopment #TechCareers #Programming #100DaysOfCode

Expectations vs. Reality: Software Edition 💻⛈️ Expectation: A smooth boat ride toward a feature launch. Reality: A constant battle against bugs, technical debt, and system maintenance. Building software is a sprint; maintaining it is a marathon in a thunderstorm. It’s not just a role; it’s a mission to keep everything afloat. Which "leak" are you patching today? 🛠️ A) Broken Code B) Technical Debt C) Security Patches D) All of the above! #Technology #SoftwareDevelopment #Innovation #Coding #DevOps #TechCommunity

One of the best example of what people thinks about development and what the dev actually is... Its constant battle of change.

Navigating the "Red Screen" Moment Nothing tests a team’s resolve quite like a 500 Critical Error in a live environment. 🚨 We’ve all been there: the logs are scrolling, the alerts are firing, and the pressure is on to find that one line of code or infrastructure hiccup causing the disruption. While these moments are high-stress, they are also the greatest opportunities for growth, improving our monitoring stacks, and refining our incident response protocols. The goal isn't just to fix the crash—it's to build a system resilient enough to handle the next one. How does your team handle live application crashes? Do you have automated rollbacks? Is your observability stack ready for real-time debugging? What’s your "go-to" first step when the alerts hit? Let’s talk about best practices for keeping cool when the production environment heats up. 👇 #SoftwareEngineering #DevOps #SystemArchitecture #CodingLife #SRE #TechLeadership #Debugging #IncidentResponse #WebDevelopment #Programming #SoftwareReliability #CloudComputing

A feature is already in 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. And then you start seeing 𝗶𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲𝘀. Not crashes. Not alerts. Just… things behaving 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆. A button not responding. A slight delay in API response. An edge case never seen in testing. 𝗡𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗱𝗼? 🤔 Roll back the deployment? Revert multiple commits? Ship a rushed hotfix? Debug under pressure? All of this… while the code is already 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲. There’s another option. 𝗧𝘂𝗿𝗻 𝗼𝗳𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲. That’s exactly where 𝗳𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗳𝗹𝗮𝗴𝘀 help. 🚩 Instead of tying 𝗱𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 to 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲, feature flags let you 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗹 when users actually see the feature. So when something feels off: → Turn the flag off → Everything goes back to normal → No rollback needed → No redeploy required → No user impact That’s when it clicks: 𝗗𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹. 𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻. Feature flags 𝘀𝗲𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝘄𝗼. Now instead of “deploy and pray”, we: → Deploy safely → Enable internally first → Roll out gradually → Monitor real usage → Turn off instantly if needed It’s a small practice. But it creates a 𝗵𝘂𝗴𝗲 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗲𝘁 𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗳𝘁: Deploy → Hope → Fix under pressure 🚨 becomes Deploy → 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗹 → 𝗢𝗯𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗲 → 𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 ✅ Because sometimes the 𝘀𝗮𝗳𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗶𝘅… is simply having the ability to 𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗻 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗳𝗳. #SoftwareEngineering #FeatureFlags #BackendDevelopment #TechCareers #SystemDesign #CodingBestPractices #DevOps #EngineeringCulture #TechLearning #Developers #Production #SoftwareDeveloper #TechTips #BuildInPublic

Deployment strategies every engineer should understand... And one that absolutely nobody should use. 1. Big Bang Deployment Here's how it works: You build a feature for two weeks. You test it on your machine. Everything is beautiful. Then you push it straight to prod. (it sounds bad already) Sure this is the easiest way out but if and when something breaks so help you God. This one is no bueno. 2. Blue-Green Deployment Better. You run two identical environments. So basically in parallel and you'd route traffic to it using a load balancer. Rollback is fast. That's great. But if that new code has a nasty bug, it still hits everyone at once when you flip the switch. Better than big bang but still not there yet. 3. Canary Deployment The smart play. You roll out new code to like 1% of users first. You watch it. You breathe. If nothing breaks then you roll out to 5%, then 25%, then everyone. If something breaks, only a tiny sliver of users ever see it. This is the way. Tho there are cases where you just have to big bang it... example being a side project you know isn't very significant. I'll like to hear your thoughts in the comments. #DevOps #SoftwareEngineering #DeploymentStrategies #Coding

Here’s an easy way to spot a developer who actually cares about your product 👇 Are they upgrading dependencies? Sounds small. It’s not. Most developers ignore it. They ship features and move on. But the ones who really care: • Keep dependencies updated • Reduce security risks • Improve performance over time • Prevent future technical debt Upgrading dependencies isn’t “extra work.” It’s ownership. Because great developers don’t just build… They maintain, protect, and evolve what they build. Am I right?

Spent an extra 4 hours in the office today… not building new features, but fixing tests. 1049 tests. All green. ✅ It’s easy to celebrate shipping features, but the real discipline is in maintaining what’s already there: – Fixing broken tests – Covering edge cases – Making sure yesterday’s code still works today There’s something humbling about debugging a failing test suite. It forces you to slow down, think deeper, and respect the system you’re building. Today’s win wasn’t flashy. No new UI. No big release. Just stability, confidence, and a cleaner codebase. And honestly, that’s what good engineering looks like. To every developer putting in the unseen hours to make systems reliable — it matters. #SoftwareEngineering #Laravel #Testing #BuildInPublic #Discipline #Developers #QualityCode

Dev. Staging. Production. Everyone talks about it. But do you understand what it really means? A development environment isn’t just “where code runs.” It’s where ideas are tested fast, broken safely, and iterated without friction. Staging isn’t a formality either. It’s your last line of defense before users ever feel your mistakes. If it doesn’t behave like production, it’s not staging. If you skip it, you’re testing in production whether you admit it or not. The difference between stable systems and constant firefighting often comes down to this: Can developers experiment freely without risk? Can you validate changes in a production like environment before release? Do you catch failures early or after users do? Good teams don’t just build features. They build confidence in every release. That’s what proper environment separation gives you. If you’re building internal platforms or working with Kubernetes, this becomes even more critical. Your environments are your safety net. #PlatformEngineering #IDP #K8s #DevOps

Great developers don’t guess. They isolate. When something breaks, average developers: → Try random fixes Experienced developers: → Narrow the problem space Debugging is not trial-and-error. It’s structured thinking under pressure. The faster you isolate, the faster you solve. #Debugging #SoftwareEngineering #ProblemSolving #DeveloperSkills