Articles by Brad Culberson

Read how we accommodate large volumes of email and the load generated by large insertions or updates of recipient lists using Kafka as a data pipeline. Read More ›

When a teammate discovers a potential issue that may affect customers or team efficiency we raise that awareness immediately. We pull the Andon Cord. Read More ›

When you get deep into the details, sometimes you miss the easiest solution–one you already know and are capable of because you have already done it once. Last year, we were battling some major scaling issues in Riak search which is based on Solr. Find out how we solved this problem. Read More ›

SendGrid is using Riak and Solr for the Marketing Campaigns contacts dataset. We built a disaster recovery plan that protects that dataset from corruption/unintentional deletion/data center loss. This is a challenging task due to the size and growth of that data. We’re currently storing approximately 2TB of key value data and 18TB of Solr index data. Read More ›

Most developers think caching is like bacon. You can add it to anything and it’s better. Brad Culberson, Principal Engineer II at SendGrid shares how he runs across code in production that is frequently overly complex and actually performing worse due to caching. This article will guide you on what to look for and how you should evaluate whether your cache is detrimental to your application. Read More ›