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Retry Storms: How Good Clients Take Down Healthy Servers

A retry looks harmless: the request failed, so try again. Multiply that by every client, add one slow dependency, and retries turn into a self-inflicted DDoS. This walks from the naive retry loop to exponential backoff, jitter, retry budgets and circuit breakers, the caller-side half of resilience that pairs with rate limiting on the server.

Why Redis Rate Limiting Breaks at Scale (and What Uber Does Instead)

A token bucket in memory is trivial. Put it behind Redis and it works, until it doesn't. This walks through rate limiting from one node, to a shared Redis, to why that model collapses at millions of requests per second, and the shift Uber made: enforce locally, coordinate globally, and drop by probability.

Protobuf FieldMask for Writes: One Update Endpoint, No Ambiguity

A single Update method that changes only the fields you name, with no endpoint per field and no clobbering the rest. How the update_mask brings clean PATCH semantics to gRPC: setting, clearing, nested paths, and the empty-mask trap that can silently wipe data.