Josh Mize

"Backend is easy." Oh... yeah... totally... Easy like: Wrangling Redis like it's Gandalf at the gate. Slicing transactions into bite sized commit snacks so your DB doesn't choke to death. Playing 4D chess with phased micro batched transactions while the clock screams timeout. Writing saga style rollback code to deal with distributed transaction failure, that feels less like code and more like a voodoo ritual. Do it right? No one notices. Do it wrong? PagerDuty speedruns your REM cycle. Backend isn’t "just CRUD." Backend is Dark Souls on production mode. Backend is yoga with knives. Backend is building a sand mandala and then setting it on fire for consistency guarantees. But sure. "Easy."

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Accidentally discovered a new way to work with GitHub Copilot today: write new tests based off test coverage reports. Copilot (or I) run this command to generate a report of all the uncovered lines in the current diff: pytest --cov --cov-report=xml && \ diff-cover coverage.xml --html-report coverage_report.html && \ open coverage_report.html Then Copilot reviews the report, summarizes the uncovered situations, and proposes new test cases to add, or if the code is truly unreachable, suggests deleting it. Just another reason why you should add diff-cover (or similar tool) to your projects!

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Screw vibecoding. You know what LLM coding agents are *really* useful for? Reverse-engineering legacy code! "Hey can you research and explain how the flux capacitor settings are loaded, specifically where are the margadon-level overrides applied exactly?" It's a lifesaver.

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It is impossible to call yourself an experienced infrastructure/distributed systems engineer if you have consistently switched jobs every two years. You become a rockstar engineer by building complex infrastructure, operating them at scale, migrating users, fixing issues and rolling out v2/v3 of the system. You learn a lot going through this cycle and learn important life lessons. It typically requires persistence and continuous grind for years to build reliable and scalable systems. My advice is to commit and persist for four years or more at a place to become a solid distributed systems engineer. Sounds old school but this is how it works. AI is not going to speed this cycle anytime soon for building deep distributed systems.

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Developers: Are you your team’s silent safety net? Every dev team has that one engineer  The one who stays late fixing broken scripts. Reviews everyone’s pull requests. Debugs someone else’s code at 9PM. The unspoken catcher of all things dropped. But here’s the harsh truth: If you’re constantly doing their job… who’s doing yours? 🚨 Helping too much can hurt your growth. You’ll miss your own deliverables, delay feature launches, and even get overlooked in performance reviews all while untangling someone else’s tech debt. 🚫 You might be propping up bad practices. If others rely on you to fix their bugs, it hides deeper problems. Sometimes, they even get rewarded for work you quietly finished. 📉 You’re unknowingly weakening the team. If delivery depends on a hidden hero, you’re building a fragile culture ,not just fragile code. ✅ A better way? • Make your contributions visible. • Advocate clean processes. • Promote code ownership and accountability. And when someone falls short .let the system respond. They’ll either level up, or step aside. 💡 In tech, silent heroics don’t scale. Clarity and accountability do. Don’t just cover , contribute with visibility. #SoftwareEngineering #TeamCulture #Leadership #DevTips #CodeOwnership #EngineeringExcellence

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Speaking of scaling mysql... Uber runs thousands of mysql clusters + manages their fleet with a bunch of interesting tooling. This is a great read for those curious how big companies manage DBs at scale! https://lnkd.in/gH4EUDSV

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