A Node.js service was writing UTC timestamps to a PostgreSQL database configured for Europe/Berlin. Nobody noticed the mismatch until a DST transition made an entire hour of orders vanish from daily reports.
A client's dashboard took 11 seconds to render. Everyone blamed the database. The real problem was an ORM doing exactly what we told it to — we just never looked at what that meant.
A consulting story about a nightly billing job that quietly started double-charging customers after a Kubernetes migration — and the boring lock that finally fixed it.
A debugging deep dive into replacing wall-of-text logs with structured logging and trace IDs — and how it cut our mean time to resolution from hours to minutes.