Weeknotes

Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 19th June 2026.

This week, I:

• read two blog posts by Sean Goedecke: Doing nothing at work and Working with product managers. Katie sent me a link to the first, as we talked about learning time recently. Thanks, Katie!
• stopped trying to understand why DuckDB ran out of memory during a long-running process. The problem wasn’t caused by changes to either DuckDB or the long-running process. It was caused by other processes using more memory than they had previously used.

Running out of memory

We run many of our services on DigitalOcean Droplets (virtual machines). Each Droplet hosts several services, which we manage using Dokku; each service is a Dokku app. This approach is familiar to us and we have tooling to setup Droplets and Dokku apps.

Increasingly, I feel the short-term benefits of familiarity and tooling are small compared to the long-term costs of poor legibility. The interactions between our services are unclear. We add caching to service A and, sometime later, service B runs out of memory; we allow service C to access service A’s database and, sometime later, discover that each has started a couple of dozen processes.

We should take the time to consider alternative, less familiar, approaches and to update our tooling.