Go on vnykmshr

autobreaker: adaptive circuit breaking

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The circuit breaker post from last year used a common trigger: trip after N consecutive failures. This works when traffic is predictable. It falls apart when it’s not.

At 10,000 requests per second, 10 failures is noise – a 0.1% error rate. A static threshold trips the circuit on what’s essentially a healthy service. At 10 requests per second, 10 failures is total collapse – 100% error rate over one interval. The same threshold that false-positives under high traffic is too slow to protect under low traffic.

The compiler as first reviewer

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

When I joined, a few of us who had recently come in would skip the daily standups. Clock in, clock out, heads down. The rest of the team wasn’t sure what we were working on. This went on for a while. We were reading the existing codebase and quietly rewriting pieces in Go – proving it could handle production before anyone had to commit to it.

That changed when Go got formally introduced. The direction came from above – Go was the language for the new services. Now it wasn’t a side experiment, it was the stack. And the PRs were coming in faster than anyone could review them all.

The same tree, twice

Fri, 22 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I am building the promocode engine again.

This is the second time. The first was in Node.js, at a previous company, on top of a small library called business-rules. The engine worked. I thought the shape was brilliant.

I am building it again in Go, from scratch, and the shape is exactly the same.

The first time

The first promocode engine was an AND/OR decision tree. A rule had conditions in groups, groups nested inside groups, leaves that compared a fact to a value. A rule was data in the database – a flattened tree stored across MySQL rows – but it evaluated against facts that had to be computed live.

Designing a wallet

Sun, 20 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’m building a wallet service in Go. Users add money from their bank, the balance sits in the wallet, and they spend it on the platform. Small payments – the kind where going through a full bank authentication flow every time is more friction than the transaction is worth.

The pitch is simple: top up once, spend without thinking. No OTP for every payment. No redirect to the bank’s page. One click, done.

Switching to Go

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’d been building production services with Node.js since 2013. Custom blog engines, API services, real-time backends. The ecosystem was rich, iteration was fast, and for moderate-load services, it worked well.

The limits showed up at scale. A latency-sensitive payment processing API exposed three problems that were manageable at lower traffic but compounded at higher volumes.

GC pauses. Node’s garbage collector introduced latency spikes that were unpredictable and hard to tune. For payment processing, where consistent response times matter more than peak throughput, this was the biggest concern. A p99 spike during a GC pause means a user staring at a spinner while their payment hangs.