There’s a certain kind of engineering story that only comes out under pressure — the real stories that reveal themselves when systems are stressed, customers are demanding, and the infrastructure either bends or breaks. RoachFest 2025 is about honoring these stories, and providing space for enthusiasts and experts to gather and share what they’re building, challenges they encountered, and how they fixed it.

Rob Reid

April 21, 2025

Tweeq's cloud-agnostic "no-brainer" tech stack — Go, CockroachDB, Temporal, Bazel, and gRPC, deployed on Oracle Cloud — let them build a payments platform that is scalable to millions of users, available 24/7, extensible, and easy to change.

Rob Reid

December 14, 2023

Just the thought of updating the database schema is enough to give some developers and architects a headache. Designing a good schema is hard enough. Updating it once it’s in production? That has to be a nightmare. Right? Well, historically it certainly has been! But it doesn’t have to be. Let’s take a look at the options for dealing with database schema, and learn how live schema changes solve challenges with both traditional relational databases and NoSQL document-store alternatives.

Rob Reid

December 8, 2023

In my experience as a software engineer (and generally as a human, come to think of it), it seems to be universally easier to go from 2 to 3 of something, than it is to go from 1 to 2. For example, if your application already supports 2 languages, adding a 3rd is simple; whereas, if your application only supports 1 language, you need to build support for internationalization, before you can add the 2nd. The same holds true for application architecture; adding a 3rd region to an application that’s already distributed and supports multiple regions is much easier than making a single region application distributed (can run across multiple machines) and then multi-region (region/locality awareness).

Rob Reid

August 14, 2023

In this post Rob and I explain how we built Silo, a fully functioning multi-region Next.js application combining CockroachDB multi-region serverless and a multi-region Node.js (Lambda) API backed by a Geographically aware Route 53 Hosted Zone. Both the API and CockroachDB have been deployed to AWS. The Next.js app has been deployed using Vercel. There are a number of reasons why you’d want to choose a multi-region strategy; to optimize latency, maintain high availability and, in some cases, to comply with regional regulations. But, rather than tell you about the benefits, I’d like to show you.

Rob Reid

May 17, 2023

Disasters are expensive. Hilariously expensive. In my career as a software engineer, I’ve employed a bunch of technologies and witnessed most of them - in some way - fail and cause downtime. Downtime (and the thought of downtime), alongside Toilet Time Debugging™, are among the endless reasons a Software Engineer may struggle to switch off.

Rob Reid

May 2, 2023