Ben Lvovsky Articles
Essays on software engineering — architecture, teams, and the incentives we build around them.
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"It Takes Too Long for Serverless" — Usually Doesn't
The 15-minute limit is a signal the problem needs rethinking, not the infrastructure scaling up. Five scenarios, three patterns.
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The Vanilla Ice Cream Problem
A Pontiac owner's car wouldn't start, but only when he bought vanilla ice cream. The pattern was real; the explanation was wrong. That gap is where four-hour outages live.
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How Jira Metrics Slowly Killed Creativity on My Team
Over a couple of years our culture shifted from "let's find the best way to solve this" to "let's close the ticket." The good engineers left, velocity went up, and nothing in the reporting system ever showed a decline.
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How Docker Compose Quietly Undoes a Cloud Migration
The architecture diagram says managed services. Every developer's laptop says Postgres, RabbitMQ, Redis and a Compose file. You can pay for a cloud migration and still develop on-premises — and the people doing it are usually the ones senior enough to know better.