.tip

Jun 30, 2026 · one of the small things

Put deploys on the graphs

Most incidents start within minutes of a deploy, and the quickest diagnosis is seeing the line bend right after the marker.

curl -X POST "$METRICS/events" -d '{"title":"deploy web 4.2.1","tags":["deploy","web"]}'

That's one call at the end of the deploy pipeline. Every latency and error panel gets a vertical line, and "what changed?" answers itself.

observabilityoperations

~/tips/today — 2026-10-19

~cat tips/today

Never build an index on a live table without CONCURRENTLY

postgresqlmigrations

A plain CREATE INDEX takes a lock that blocks every write to the table for the whole build. On a big table that means minutes of outage that look like a hung app.

CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY orders_customer_idx ON orders (customer_id);

It's slower and can't run inside a transaction, so you'll have to tell your migration tool. If it fails halfway, it leaves an invalid index behind, so check pg_index.indisvalid and drop it before you retry.

↵ open y yesterday l ls /tips

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