track: when it breaks

6 articles · newest first

Isometric diorama of a turnstile gate letting a small, steady number of figures through per minute while a crowd waits their turn behind it

Rate limits, explained: the guardrail every vibe coder forgets

Lesson 6 of when it breaks: the one guardrail vibe coders skip until the bots or the bill arrive. What a rate limit is, why every public app needs one, and what happens without it.

Sam Ortega · 1h ago · 4 min

Photographic wide shot of a dark, hazy data-center hall, rows of server racks lit only by small green and red indicator lights, conveying large scale

Build

What is scaling? What happens when a hundred people show up

Lesson 5 of when it breaks: what happens to a vibe-coded app when it suddenly gets popular. What scaling is, the two ways to do it, and why "it worked with ten users" isn't "it works with ten thousand".

Sam Ortega · 1h ago · 4 min

Flat illustration of a friendly worker taking numbered task tickets from a tidy waiting line and completing them one by one at a desk

Build

Queues and background jobs: don't make the user wait

Lesson 4 of when it breaks: why a vibe-coded app should hand slow jobs to a queue instead of making the user wait. What a background job is, and why it keeps an app responsive under load.

Sam Ortega · 1h ago · 4 min

Editorial infographic contrasting a slow first request that computes an answer with a fast repeat request served instantly from a labelled cache box

Build

What is caching? Why it's fast, and why it goes stale

Lesson 3 of when it breaks: why a vibe-coded page can be lightning fast, then suddenly show something out of date. What a cache is, why it makes things quick, and the classic bug it causes.

Sam Ortega · 1h ago · 4 min

Realistic painterly illustration of a lone courier racing along a very long winding road at dusk, a distant city glowing far ahead

Build

What is latency? Why your app feels slow for some people

Lesson 2 of when it breaks: why a vibe-coded app feels instant for you and sluggish for someone across the world. What latency is, what causes it, and the one thing that fixes most of it.

Sam Ortega · 1h ago · 4 min

Isometric diorama of a small monitoring desk with a screen showing a scrolling list of log lines, one highlighted in red, and a magnifier beside it

Build

What is an error log? The first place to look when it breaks

Lesson 1 of when it breaks: when your vibe-coded app suddenly fails, this is the first place to look. What an error log is, how to read one, and why "it just broke" almost never means that.

Sam Ortega · 1h ago · 4 min