The author shares eight practices they adopted while building an in-memory cache, focusing on efficiency, simplicity, and reliability. They emphasize using off-the-shelf solutions whenever possible, prioritizing cost and reliability over features, moving quickly from idea to production to determine necessary features, utilizing simple data structures to avoid performance issues, reserving resources early to prevent late crashes, setting maximums to prevent long wait times, making testing easy with input commands, and embedding performance counters for monitoring program behavior. These practices, gained through experience, aim to simplify software engineering and produce high-performance results. The author also mentions potentially controversial decisions and the importance of production experience in software development.
https://entropicthoughts.com/practices-of-reliable-software-design