Charlie Custer
Senior Technical Content MarketerCharlie is a former teacher, tech journalist, and filmmaker who’s now combined those three professions into writing and making videos about databases and application development (and occasionally messing with NLP and Python to create weird things in his spare time).
Product
Inventory management on Black Friday: Challenges and solutions
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are like the Superbowl for retailers. Instead of point spreads, though, e-commerce companies are betting on peak sales numbers. But while the deluge of deals evokes dreams of dollars for CEOs, the surging site traffic can be more of a nightmare for CTOs. The onslaught of shoppers puts huge amounts of stress on their application architecture. In this scenario, even a minor problem with inventory management can cause major consequences.
Charlie Custer
November 7, 2024
System
How to build a payments system that scales to infinity (with examples)
Everybody, from banking applications to retailers to SaaS applications, deals with payment processing. But architecting a system that can deal with payments at scale is challenging.
Charlie Custer
May 8, 2024
Product
Metadata management reference architecture: A quick guide with diagrams
Metadata management is a critical part of any business application. Let’s take a quick look at what metadata is, why it’s important, and how you can architect your application to ensure highly available, consistent metadata at scale.
Charlie Custer
April 30, 2024
How to build a user metadata store that lets you turn off PagerDuty
Charlie Custer
April 12, 2024
Best practices for user metadata management at enterprise scale
Charlie Custer
April 2, 2024
What is a DBaaS, and why would you want one?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of managed database-as-a-service offerings, and why should you consider letting someone else operate your database?
Charlie Custer
February 1, 2024
Product
How to build an inventory management system that scales (with reference architecture)
One of the biggest technical challenges of inventory management is keeping data consistent in real time, or as close to it as possible. Particularly with larger operations, this is vital to avoid “overselling” scenarios that can cost the company money or damage its reputation.
Charlie Custer
January 25, 2024
How one company is beating the cloud giants at their own game
Cloud storage with enterprise-grade availability, durability, and performance – all for less than what the major CSPs charge? It's possible. Here's how.
Charlie Custer
January 23, 2024
What is cloud SQL, and which cloud SQL database is right for you?
What is cloud SQL? For that matter, what is Cloud SQL, and is it different from cloud SQL? Let's get to the bottom of this important but somewhat confusing (thanks, Google!) term.
Charlie Custer
January 16, 2024
PostgreSQL data types: what are they, and when to use each
Let's take a look at the most commonly-used data types in Postgres and how they're used in practice, including examples.
Charlie Custer
January 12, 2024