Benjamin Cane
@madflojo.bsky.social
đ¤ 11
đĽ 61
đ 74
Distinguished Engineer @ American Express. Thoughts and Opinions are my own.
Weighted load balancing has saved me more times than I can count. TL;DR: Weighted load balancing lets you shift traffic by percentage, making migrations, canaries, and production changes far safer than all-at-once cutovers.
bencane.com/posts/2026-0...
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https://bencane.com/posts/2026-05-14/
3 days ago
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Cut a new release of madflojo/tasks over the weekend. Mostly focused on maintainability improvements, cleanup, and hardening the codebase a bit more. Shout out to the friendly neighborhood LLMs for taking up most of the grunt work.
github.com/madflojo/tas...
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Release v1.3.0 ¡ madflojo/tasks
1.3.0 (2026-05-10) Features recover panics from task callbacks (62a350c) Bug Fixes avoid nil recover panic reports (321b1fc) ci: remove stale goveralls install (00f2bf7) guard delayed interval s...
https://github.com/madflojo/tasks/releases/tag/v1.3.0
9 days ago
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YOLO Is a Terrible Strategy for Validating Production Changes. TL;DR: Validate production changes in layersâcanary, shadow traffic, synthetic traffic, and smoke testsâso customers donât become your QA team.
bencane.com/posts/2026-0...
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https://bencane.com/posts/2026-05-07/
10 days ago
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Deterministic routing is one of the most effective ways for distributed systems to reduce consistency problems at scale. tl;dr: Route requests for the same data to the same place to scale systems while reducing stale reads and coordination overhead.
bencane.com/posts/2026-0...
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https://bencane.com/posts/2026-04-30/
18 days ago
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I was looking up a configuration for HA Proxy and came across an article that had all the answers I needed. But it seemed familiar somehow⌠Oh, wait, I wrote it 10 years ago. đ
19 days ago
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Running the same microservice in multiple platforms can sometimes be better than centralizing it. TL;DR: Reuse the codebase locally to reduce coupling, latency, and the impact of failures.
bencane.com/posts/2026-0...
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https://bencane.com/posts/2026-04-23/
25 days ago
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Recently, I published a few of my personal agent skills that Iâve been using for a while now. đ Review This Review a codebase, docs, or even blog content. Get a quality score and recommendations.
github.com/madflojo/rev...
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GitHub - madflojo/review-this: Agent skill for reviewing code or docs
Agent skill for reviewing code or docs. Contribute to madflojo/review-this development by creating an account on GitHub.
https://github.com/madflojo/review-this
27 days ago
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Every time a credit card is swiped, a correlation problem has to be solved in real time. In low-latency systems, you canât wait for each request to finish. I wrote a deep dive comparing how payment systems and modern distributed systems handle this. đ
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https://madflojo.dev/posts/in-flight-request-tracking-in-asynchronous-systems
29 days ago
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If youâre migrating a system without shadow traffic, youâre taking on unnecessary risk. tl;dr: Traffic mirroring lets you send real production traffic to a new system without affecting users. Itâs one of the safest ways to validate behavior before a cutover. đ
bencane.com/posts/2026-0...
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https://bencane.com/posts/2026-04-16/
about 1 month ago
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Agent Skills arenât just for actions; theyâre for institutional knowledge tl;dr: Most institutional knowledge lives in docs no one reads. Agent Skills let you capture that knowledge (frameworks, patterns, constraints) so agents can discover and apply it automatically. đ
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https://bencane.com/posts/2026-04-09/
about 1 month ago
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Saved prompts are dead. Agent Skills are the next step. â¨tl;dr: Instead of manually calling prompts, agents can now discover and execute skills based on intent. Skills bundle prompts, scripts, and context into reusable capabilities. â¨đ
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https://bencane.com/posts/2026-04-02/
about 1 month ago
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Generating code faster is only valuable if you can validate every change with confidence. AI tools are making it dramatically easier to produce code. But if you can generate changes faster than you can test them, you eventually create more software than you can safely operate.
about 2 months ago
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Iâve been experimenting with capturing how I want my Go code to look in an agent skill:
github.com/madflojo/go-...
I decided over the weekend to break it out into its own project and share it with others. Itâs very opinionated, but Iâve found it successful so far.
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GitHub - madflojo/go-style-agent-skill: Agent Skill for writing Golang code
Agent Skill for writing Golang code. Contribute to madflojo/go-style-agent-skill development by creating an account on GitHub.
http://github.com/madflojo/go-style-agent-skill
about 2 months ago
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When you go to production with gRPC, make sure youâve solved load distribution first. One of the biggest gotchas when teams roll out gRPC isnât performance. Itâs load balancing.
about 2 months ago
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Migrating the American Express Payments Network Twice with Zero Downtime. Modernization isnât real until the new system takes production traffic. Hereâs how we approached migrating from our legacy payments network to our new cloud-ready platform.
americanexpress.io/migrating-th...
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Migrating the Payments Network Twice with Zero Downtime
The architecture and coordination that kept global transactions flowing through complex application and infrastructure changes.
https://americanexpress.io/migrating-the-payments-network-twice/
2 months ago
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You may be building for availability, but are you building for resiliency? Many teams design for availability. Far fewer design for resiliency.
2 months ago
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If you're into hearing about complicated migrations of mission-critical payments platforms, you should check out my talk tomorrow at Monster Scale Summit. At AMEX, we didn't just migrate the Payments Network once; we did it twice, zero downtime.
www.scylladb.com/monster-scal...
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Monster Scale Summit Agenda - ScyllaDB
Agenda Session times are displayed in your local timezone. Agenda subject to change. Wednesday 3/11 Thursday 3/12 Instant Access
https://www.scylladb.com/monster-scale-summit/agenda/#wednesday
2 months ago
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When your coding agent doesnât understand your project, youâll get junk.
3 months ago
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You can have 100% Code Coverage and still have ticking time bombs in your code. đŁ
3 months ago
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