Welcome to 2026!

If your New Year’s resolution was to “write better code,”
I have bad news... even perfect code breaks.

In the world of “Scale”, where we handle billions of events and traffic spikes that look like vertical walls, the biggest threat to your system usually isn’t your code. It’s the code you depend on.

Today, we’re going to talk about Resilience Engineering. But because we keep things simple here, we’re going to talk about the FastPaws Carrot Delivery Service.

The Happy Path: A Bunny with a Plan

Imagine a simple feature. A customer orders a carrot. We deliver the carrot. Then, we send them an SMS saying, “Enjoy your crunch!”

In the code, it looks innocent enough:

async function deliverCarrot(order) {
 await database.save(order);
 await inventory.decrement();
 
 // The line that will ruin your life
 await messengerBunny.sendSMS("Your carrot is here!"); 
 
 return "Success!";
}

On a normal Tuesday, this works perfectly. The Messenger Bunny runs to the 3rd party SMS Burrow, drops off the message, and comes back (in ~50 milliseconds).

But today isn’t Tuesday. Today is the Great Carrot Festival (think Christmas Sale). Traffic is up 100x. And suddenly, the SMS Burrow goes silent.

The Crisis: The Infinite Wait

When the SMS provider (let’s call them BunnySMS ) has an outage, they don’t always reject your connection immediately. Sometimes, they just... hang.

In our code, that await messengerBunny.sendSMS() line is a trap.

Your Delivery Bunny runs to the SMS office and knocks on the door.
No answer. So, the bunny waits... and waits... and waits!!

Meanwhile, a new customer orders a carrot. A new Delivery Bunny is dispatched. They also run to the SMS office, knock, and wait... and wait!!

Within minutes, you have 5,000 Delivery Bunnies standing outside the SMS office, doing absolutely nothing. You see where this is going?

The Engineering Reality: This is called Resource Starvation.

Your database is fine. Your servers are healthy. But your application has crashed because every single available bunny (or thread) is stuck waiting for a 3rd party service that isn’t responding.

Solution 1: The Stopwatch (Timeouts)

The first rule of distributed systems: Never trust the network.

We need to give every Delivery Bunny a stopwatch. We tell them: “If the SMS office doesn’t open the door in 2 seconds, walk away.”

await messengerBunny.sendSMS(message, {
 timeout: 2000
}); // 2 seconds

This prevents the pile-up. The bunnies wait 2 seconds, fail, and free themselves up to handle the next order.

• In plain language: Most HTTP clients have infinite timeouts by default. Always set a limit!

• Advanced tip: Your timeout should be shorter than your SLA. If your API promises a response in 500ms, your internal timeout cannot be 2 seconds.

Solution 2: The Trap of Retries

So the bunny walks away. But the message wasn’t sent! A diligent bunny might think: “I should try again immediately.”

Do not do this.

If 10,000 bunnies fail and immediately retry, they will hit the SMS office again at the exact same millisecond. This is called a Thundering Herd. If the SMS office was struggling before, you just murdered it.

The Fix: Exponential Backoff with Jitter
Instead of knocking immediately, the bunny waits.

• Attempt 1: Wait 1 second.

• Attempt 2: Wait 2 seconds.

• Attempt 3: Wait 4 seconds.

And we add Jitter (randomness).
i.e. Bunny A waits 1.1 seconds; Bunny B waits 0.9 seconds.
This spreads the load.

I wrote an article on queues earlier. (This is also a great time for me to remind you that failed messages shouldn’t be lost, but pushed to a Dead Letter Queue!)

Solution 3: The Circuit Breaker (The Guard Bunny)

If the SMS office is on fire, why are we still sending bunnies there to check? It’s a waste of time.

Enter the Circuit Breaker pattern. Imagine we hire a Guard Bunny to stand at the gate.

1. Closed State (Normal): The Guard lets bunnies through.

2. Open State (Broken): The Guard notices that 5 bunnies came back crying in the last minute. He locks the gate.

   • Now, when you call sendSMS(), the Guard immediately says “No. It’s down.”

   • No waiting. No timeouts. Instant failure. Your system speed returns to normal.

3. Half-Open State (Testing): After 5 minutes, the Guard lets one brave bunny through.

   • If they succeed? The gate re-opens.

   • If they fail? The gate stays locked.

Solution 4: Fallbacks (The Plan B)

So the Circuit Breaker is open. We can’t send SMS. Do we crash the order?

No.

You have to ask yourself: What is the core value?
The core value is The Carrot. The SMS is just a nice-to-have side effect.

Graceful Degradation:
If the SMS fails, we catch the error and:

1. Log it to a file to retry tonight.

2. Send an email instead (using a different system).

3. Or simply do nothing.

The user gets their carrot.
They might not get the text, but they aren’t hungry.
That is a win.

Conclusion: Optimizing for Failure

When you are building for scale... whether it’s for a startup or for a billion cricket fans... resilience isn’t about preventing failure. Things will fail. Cables get cut, data centers lose power, and vendors push bad code.

• To the Junior Engineer: Your job isn’t just to make it work on the “Happy Path.” It’s to make sure that when the path breaks, your users don’t fall off a cliff.

• To the Senior Engineer: Optimizing for success is engineering; optimizing for failure is architecture.

Here’s to a resilient 2026. May your latencies be low and your circuit breakers always reset. While everyone’s approach can be different depending upon the scenario, System Design is never “Absolute”. It is a set of decisions you take basis the tools you have at the time. The tools keep evolving and you need to keep learning the new ones 🙂

Have you battled a rogue downstream dependency recently? Come share your war stories at the next Impromptu Meetup. I’ll bring the coffee; you bring the architecture diagrams.

You can also follow me on other social platforms: https://bio.link/frontend

For me, the highlights significant shifts in global internet traffic, particularly driven by AI integration, massive security threats, and the rapid adoption of post-quantum cryptography.

Global Traffic and Scale

The internet continued its relentless expansion in 2025, with global traffic growing by 19%, a notable acceleration compared to the previous year.​

• Peak Throughput: Cloudflare’s network handles an average of 81 million requests per second (RPS), peaking at 129 million RPS. This scale (approx. 7–11 trillion daily requests) offers a massive dataset for these insights.​

• Starlink Surge: Traffic from Starlink’s autonomous system (AS14593) more than doubled (2.3x) year-over-year, telling us that it is expanding rapidly.

• Outages: Nearly half of the 174 major observed internet outages were government-directed shutdowns, often tied to exams or political events. (of course they wanted to left-shift the blame 😛)​

The AI Crawler Landscape

2025 was defined by the explosion of AI-driven interactions, specifically “user action” crawling... bots that fetch real-time data in response to user queries (e.g., from a chatbot).

• User Action Spikes: This specific type of “on-demand” AI crawling increased by over 15x throughout the year.​

• Bot Dominance: Googlebot remains the undisputed heavyweight, accounting for 4.5% of all HTML request traffic (used for both search indexing and AI training). All other AI bots combined accounted for roughly 4.2% showing the massive lead.​

• API Automation: In a stat relevant to backend systems, one-fifth of all automated API requests were initiated by Go-based clients, highlighting the language’s dominance in modern microservices and tooling - a stark contrast from what I would have guessed (Python)​.

Security and Encryption

The threat landscape saw hyper-volumetric attacks reach new heights, while defensive infrastructure has already started shifting dramatically toward quantum resistance. (if you haven’t read about why security is worried about the eventual quantum leap, you need to step out of the rock!!!)

• Record DDoS: The largest attacks of the year peaked at a staggering 31.4 Tbps, a significant jump in volumetric intensity. Overall, 6.2% of global traffic was mitigated as malicious or restricted. (429s FTW!!)​

• Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC): In a massive infrastructure shift, the share of human-generated web traffic using Post-Quantum Encrypted TLS 1.3 grew from 29% to 52% by December. This was largely driven by OS-level updates (browsers and mobile OSs) enabling PQC by default. (go read!!)​

Protocol and Browser Trends

Despite the hype around newer protocols, the infrastructure mix remained remarkably stable in 2025.

• Protocol Stagnation: HTTP/3 adoption hovered around 21%, while HTTP/2 maintained dominance at 50%. This suggests that while QUIC/HTTP/3 is mature, the migration cost or inertia for many legacy backends remains high.​

• Browser Share: Chrome continues to drive nearly two-thirds of all request traffic globally. However, on iOS devices, Safari retains the majority share.​

Here is the link to the detailed report.

I’ll see you next week with some more quick reads. Stay tuned.

Remember Limitless (2011)? Bradley Cooper’s character was smart but trapped... procrastinating on his book, stuck in mediocrity, waiting for something to unlock his potential.

Then he found the pill. NZT. Instant clarity. Perfect recall. The ability to turn thoughts into reality in real-time.

We’re living that future right now. The pill is AI.

For years, most of us would think of incredible ideas and then... life would get in the way. Back to the mundane. The books we never wrote. The movies we never made. The projects we never started. Ideas remained trapped in our heads, victims of friction, complexity, and the sheer effort required to bring them to life.

That changed. Fast.

Today, if you can think it, you can build it. There’s a tool that generates images from a description. One that creates realistic videos from text. Another that composes music in seconds. Tools that solve complex code problems. Platforms that turn a rough paragraph into a polished article. Design tools that let anyone create like a professional.

The speed is almost surreal.

In the past month alone, I’ve brought more ideas to life than I did in the previous year combined. And I’m not special... anyone with curiosity and access to these tools can do the same.

The numbers back this up. The AI video generation market is projected to grow from USD 534.4 million in 2024 to USD 2.5 billion by 2032. Generative AI in music is expanding at 30.4% annually. The global market for AI content creation tools is exploding. Millions of people are already using these tools to remix their workflows, scale their output, and turn side projects into something real.

But here’s what matters: This isn’t just about speed or convenience. It’s about democratization. Historically, creating quality content required years of training, expensive equipment, specialized knowledge. Now? A good idea and a clear thought is often enough. Technical gatekeeping is dissolving. The barrier between imagination and execution has collapsed.

That said... and this is important... the pill isn’t magic. It’s amplification.

AI excels at the mechanical parts. The first draft. The initial asset. The prototype. But wisdom, judgment, intentionality, taste? That still comes from you. The version of the pill in Limitless turned Eddie into a genius overnight. The real version makes you more efficient at becoming what you’re capable of becoming. It accelerates your intention, but it can’t replace it.

There’s also a subtler risk worth considering: as everything becomes possible, expectations accelerate. What used to take a month now takes a day. Clients expect more. Timelines shrink. The cognitive burden shifts from “how do I build this?” to “what do I build next?” and “how do I make all this coherent?” It’s a different kind of productivity trap... one where you can generate endlessly but clarity becomes scarce.

So here’s the real question, and I’m genuinely curious: What are you building with these tools?

Are you shipping side projects that sat in your head for years? Experimenting with ideas that felt too niche or risky before? Reimagining what your work looks like when you’re not handcuffed by the mechanical parts? Are you noticing the shift in what’s possible? Or are you still watching from the sidelines?

The pill is real. It’s here. It’s democratized. What you build with it, though? That’s entirely on you...

Another week has slipped by.
Another month draws closer to its end, marking yet another year behind us.

How does that reality make you feel?

Are you overwhelmed by the weight of unrealized potential... thinking about everything you could have accomplished if only there had been more time? Or do you find yourself genuinely proud of what you’ve achieved this year, feeling a tangible sense of growth and progress?

The uncomfortable truth is this: statistically, only about 20% of people reading this will feel genuinely satisfied with their year’s progress. This isn’t conjecture... research consistently shows that many adults are chronic procrastinators, while the remaining 80% fall somewhere between action and inaction. But here’s what’s fascinating: the 20% who feel accomplished aren’t necessarily the smartest, most talented, or most privileged people in the room.

They’re simply the ones who refuse to hide behind procrastination.

The Cultural Normalization of Inaction

Our social media feeds have turned year-end regret into entertainment. Popular reel culture transforms the very real pain of “another year gone by with nothing to show for it” into memes and jokes we scroll past without pause. We share, we laugh, we move on... and in doing so, we normalize the very behavior that keeps us stuck.

But this collective commiseration creates a dangerous illusion. When 80% of people feel the same way, it becomes easy to convince ourselves that this is just how life works. That everyone struggles with execution. That it’s perfectly normal to perpetually postpone our most important goals.​

The 20% who break free from this cycle understand something crucial: just because something is common doesn’t make it acceptable.

Research reveals that procrastination isn’t just about poor time management... it costs us significantly. Studies show that an increase of just one point on a procrastination scale correlates with significant drop in annual salary. More tellingly, procrastinators comprise 57% of the unemployed population, while 94% of people report that procrastination negatively affects their happiness.​

The Compound Effect of Consistent Action

The achievers in that 20% aren’t operating with superhuman discipline or magical productivity systems. They’ve simply recognized that achievement is less about deserving success and more about systematically working toward it.

Neuroscience research confirms this: goals combined with regular feedback create the highest performance outcomes. Neither goals alone nor feedback alone produces meaningful results... it’s the marriage of intention with consistent measurement that drives progress.​

Those who consistently achieve understand four critical principles that separate them from the perpetual planners:

• Attention Direction: They filter out irrelevant activities and focus their energy on goal-relevant behaviors. While others get distracted by endless possibilities, achievers create laser focus.

• Effort Mobilization: They understand that energy expenditure naturally matches goal difficulty. Instead of waiting for motivation, they build systems that generate momentum through action.

• Persistence: They extend effort over time through regular progress reviews. When others lose steam after the initial excitement, they maintain steady forward movement.

• Strategy Development: They treat obstacles as puzzles to solve rather than reasons to quit. Challenges become opportunities for creative problem-solving and skill development.

The Myth of Perfect Timing

Here’s the pattern that traps the other 80%: they wait for 2026 to make “new” plans. They convince themselves that January 1st holds some magical property that will transform their motivation and discipline overnight.

This is procrastination disguised as planning.

Research on goal achievement reveals that timing isn’t the determining factor... clarity and commitment are. Studies show that people who set specific, challenging goals consistently outperform those who aim to simply “do their best”. The calendar date when you start matters far less than the specificity of what you’re starting.

The 20% who achieve their goals understand this intuitively. They don’t wait for perfect conditions or arbitrary start dates. They recognize that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is now.

The Real Difference Makers

What separates the achievers from the dreamers isn’t intelligence, resources, or luck. It’s their relationship with discomfort and uncertainty.

Research in goal psychology shows that achievement requires both motivation (the will) and cognitive strategies (the way). Most people focus exclusively on motivation... waiting to “feel ready” or “find their passion.” The 20% focus on building systems that work regardless of how they feel.

They understand that motivation follows action, not the other way around. They start before they feel ready, adjust as they learn, and persist through the inevitable dips in enthusiasm that derail everyone else.

Studies confirm that people who write down their goals are significantly more likely to achieve them than those who merely think about them. But the achievers go further... they create feedback loops, accountability systems, and environmental changes that make success more likely than failure.

The Choice That Defines Everything

As this year draws to a close, you have a choice that will fundamentally shape your next 12 months.

You can continue scrolling through memes about wasted time, sharing relatable content about procrastination, and joining the comfortable majority who will spend December planning what they’ll start in January. You can convince yourself that everyone struggles with execution, so your lack of progress is perfectly normal.

Or you can join the 20% who refuse to wait.

The opportunity isn’t in 2026... it’s in the next decision you make. The achievers aren’t waiting for perfect conditions, unlimited time, or divine inspiration. They’re taking imperfect action toward important goals, right now, despite not feeling ready.

Your future self will thank you not for the perfect plan you created, but for the imperfect progress you started. The compound effect of consistent action, begun today, will separate you from the crowd more effectively than any New Year’s resolution ever could.

Stop waiting for tomorrow to begin what you could start today. The 20% who will look back on 2026 with pride aren’t the ones making plans for January... they’re the ones taking action in October or November.

The question isn’t whether you have time. The question is whether you’ll join the small percentage of people who refuse to let another year slip by unfulfilled.

What are you going to start today?

When I first dug into how large language models (LLMs) work, I ran into a recurring explanation: 👉 At their core, LLMs are just dealing with tokens.

You type something in, it breaks your text into tokens, crunches probabilities, and spits out more tokens.

Simple. Mechanical. Almost… boring.

And naturally my skeptical brain went: “Okay, so what happens if you throw something at it that doesn’t exist in its whole token universe?”

So I decided to run an experiment. One word. Pure nonsense. Completely new.

And that’s how Brectha was born.

The Experiment

I coined “Brectha” and gave it a meaning:

“To breathe underwater.”

A word no one has seen. Not in any dictionary, not in Tolkien, not in gaming lore. My expectation? The model would stumble. Maybe spit out, “I don’t know that word,” or worse, treat it as gibberish.

Instead, what happened actually shocked me.

What the AI Did with “Brectha”

Not only did the LLM take my word seriously, it… well, ran with it.

• It created clean example sentences.

• Built me a dictionary style entry (part of speech, pronunciation, usage, even related forms like brecthing and brecthed).

• Imagined how the word could enter pop culture: in sci-fi novels, VR games, meditation retreats, even marketing slogans.

• Proposed a roadmap for how “Brectha” might weave itself into human language over the next decade.

What started as my scratch-test suddenly looked like the early life of a real word.

Wait, How Is This Possible If It Only Knows Tokens?

Here’s the cool part.

LLMs never saw “Brectha” before.
Zero training examples.

But they have seen endless patterns of:

• how words like breathe/breath behave,

• how suffixes like -a or -tha often feel,

• how definitions, examples, and cultural usage typically look.

So, when I dropped “Brectha” into the conversation, the model didn’t need a historical definition. It built one on the fly using learned patterns.

That’s the magic:

Tokens aren’t limits. They’re Lego bricks.
And the model has learned a million ways to snap them together into new shapes.

📅 The Possible Journey of “Brectha”

At this point, I thought: What if “Brectha” really took off? What would its journey look like?

The model even helped sketch a whimsical timeline:

2025 🫧 
➝ Word is coined in an experiment
("Brectha" = to breathe underwater).
➝ Shared as a fun blog post.
Early adopters chuckle and try using it in private conversations.

2026 🌊
➝ Sci-fi short stories and indie games pick it up.
➝ Diving enthusiasts start creating memes: "Learn to Brectha!"

2028 🎮
➝ Major VR game introduces "Brectha" as a special underwater ability.
➝ Word starts trending in gaming communities.

2030 🧘
➝ Meditation apps use "Brectha" metaphorically: "Brectha through stress."
➝ Influencers casually drop it into lifestyle and wellness content.    

2032 📖
➝ The word gets its first unofficial listing in online slang dictionaries.
➝ Pop culture adopts it: interviews, TV shows, and late-night comedy skits.

2035 📚
➝ Language authorities recognize it in official dictionaries.
➝ Used both literally (new tech gadgets that help you brectha underwater) and figuratively ("Just brectha and relax").

Suddenly, a nonsense test word felt like it had a future… a simulated life cycle, a cultural footprint.

My “Aha!” Moment

Reading about LLMs, you’d think they’re bound to whatever tokens live in their fixed vocabulary. Talking to them is a completely different experience.

They don’t just repeat… they generalize.
They don’t just memorize… they improvise.
They don’t just accept old words… they welcome new ones.

That’s why “Brectha” worked. The model didn’t “know” it, but it could make sense of it instantly and let it grow into something bigger than just a test word.

And to me, that was pleasantly surprising. Like realizing your calculator not only solves your equation, but also writes you a story about where that number might live in the real world.

The Bigger Learning

This experiment taught me something valuable:

• Yes, LLMs are statistical systems at the core.

• But what emerges is a tool that feels creative, adaptive, even playful.

• The token system that feels like a straitjacket in theory is a powerful foundation for endless recombination.

Because language itself is alive. We’ve always invented words… selfie, emoji, google it. And now, interestingly enough, LLMs are companions in playing this game of invention.

Wrapping Up

So here’s my reflection: when you hear that “LLMs are only token machines,” don’t write them off. Go test them.

Coin your own word. See what happens.

I invented Brectha, expecting failure. Instead, I got a mini-dictionary, cultural lore, and even a sneak peek at its possible future in society. That felt less like rigid token math and more like co-creating with a language partner.

👉 Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll really need a word like “Brectha.” And when that moment comes, we already gave it its first breath.

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