Gaurish

Building things that extract data and posts that extract assumptions | The Unexamined Obvious

[jack @jack]

the government of india does not like technologies like bitchat and wants it taken down

[Gaurish @gaurishkant]

if you want to go deeper, look up:

- aws, google cloud & stripe docs on their recommended retry strategies
- thundering herd

up next: circuit breaker pattern, it's the next level up from retries

[Gaurish @gaurishkant]

junior devs write code assuming the network never fails

mid-level devs add retry blocks to handle the failures

senior devs know those exact same retry blocks might eventually take down production

let's talk about this 👇

[Gaurish @gaurishkant]

quick checklist for your retry logic:

- backoff
- jitter
- max delay
- retry limit
- logging

and remember, some things you shouldn't retry at all
- bad requests
- non-idempotent requests (eg payments)
- reqs that already succeeded but timed out - you might duplicate the action

[Gaurish @gaurishkant]

github's actual 503 page says:

"The Unicorns have taken over. We're doing our best to get them under control."

i always thought this was quirky branding

touche @github

[Gaurish @gaurishkant]

TIL why GitHub shows a unicorn when their service is down 🦄

they use Unicorn, a Ruby HTTP server, to serve their app

when the server crashes, the unicorn gets angry

the Easter egg is literally just their tech stack lol

[Gaurish @gaurishkant]

it gets better.

unicorn's own README describes itself as an HTTP server that has "done decades of damage to the entire Ruby ecosystem due to its ability to tolerate (and thus encourage) bad code."

the maintainer literally roasts their own project in the docs

[Gaurish @gaurishkant]

think of it like impersonating a browser instead of just hitting an endpoint

open devtools, copy what works, remove what you don’t need

beats guessing every time

[Gaurish @gaurishkant]

most scraping bugs are just header bugs

your script gets blocked or returns garbage? check if your headers match what the browser sends

saved me countless hours

[Gaurish @gaurishkant]

DO NOT MIX HEADERS FROM DIFFERENT SOURCES

chrome user agent + random headers from a blog/stackoverflow/reddit means you’re telling the website ‘I’m definitely not a real browser’

copy all headers from the same browser. chrome is safest since it’s most traffic anyway