Writing
Stories from real systems
Outages, breaches, weird bugs, and what they taught me.
- databases2026
1-Minute Timeouts to 5 Seconds: Moving Reports Off MariaDB
2020. Reports on a 4 GB MariaDB hit 1-minute timeouts. Years of indexing tricks and forum advice before moving analytics to ClickHouse. Reports came back in 5 seconds.
- security2026
A Hack, 15 Sleepless Nights and the Biggest Lesson of My Career
January 2020. Exposed PHPMyAdmin on a live server. An attacker pulled £5,000 of stock and would not leave. Fifteen days of cat-and-mouse to find the door and shut it.