For the love of Sherlock Holmes, I had to visit the Sherlock Holmes museum that has been on my list for a while now. In issue #42 of this newsletter, I wrote about my love for Benedict’s version of Sherlock.

There have been different versions of Sherlock since 1893. Fun fact: a wall poster in the museum showcases all the actors who have portrayed Sherlock over the years.

The museum features antiques that Sherlock originally used during his investigative years before he retired to beekeeping. The museum offers a guided tour of the first floor, explaining how Sherlock would welcome his guests, where he sat to decide whether to take a case, and how, if he were bored, he would do some chemistry on the side.

Whenever he was bored, he would also shoot the wall of his flat, which Mrs Hudson did not appreciate. As a result, she raised his rent three times. In the museum, the bullet holes form the initials VR, which stand for Victoria Regina, the royal cypher of Queen Victoria.

The museum also provides a miniature version of itself, which is pretty neat. I highly recommend visiting the museum at least once if you are a Sherlock fan.

Give your engineers a kingdom! This article explains how to give each engineer ownership of 1-2 substantial areas (apps, services, integrations, tools) where they can make decisions and prioritise work, not just execute orders.

The cost of design iteration in software engineering. This article explains that even small design changes in software trigger large cascades of work across data models, interfaces and deployments. It also demonstrates how a minor adjustment can become major once the system is mature and thoughtful, and early decisions do matter.

LinkedIn authorises tens of millions of API calls per second by using an in-service client with cached ACLs and asynchronous logging to stay fast, consistent, and observable at scale.

The Dark Side of IT: How US-EAST-1 Took Europe Offline and Why GDPR is in the Crosshairs. The article explains how an Amazon Web Services US‑East‑1 outage unexpectedly disrupted many European services and revealed hidden data-flow and jurisdiction risks under the General Data Protection Regulation.

Identifying and optimising the correct slow SQL queries by measuring execution time, usage frequency, and impact can significantly improve performance without unthinkingly rewriting everything.

Productivity Habits to keep moving forward by proactively unblocking tasks, reducing debugging time with strong tools and logging, and automating repetitive work

Sharding our core Postgres database (without any downtime).

Lessons Learned in Data Engineering 2025: Do’s, Don’ts & Best Practices.

What I learned from the book Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

The grind won’t get you there.

Recommendations for Getting the Most Out of a Technical Book.

The word of the day is Writhe. To writhe means to twist your body from side to side when the body is in pain.

Example in a sentence:
After the fight, she was writhing in pain.

I am making my grand departure into the unknown.

Until the next fortnight, my treasured reader, go forth, and may the odds be ever in your favour! 👏 🤖 ✊ ☠️ 🏹 🪖

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