https://chetandalal.net/posts/Recent content in Blog on Chetan Dalal — Senior Software EngineerHugo -- gohugo.ioen-US© 2019–2026 Chetan Dalalhttps://chetandalal.net/posts/evaluating-ai-without-ground-truth/Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://chetandalal.net/posts/evaluating-ai-without-ground-truth/Most AI features ship without a defensible way to tell whether a change made them better. Here’s how to build an evaluation approach when ground truth doesn’t exist, and how to be honest about what it can’t tell you.https://chetandalal.net/posts/deleting-alerts-improved-reliability/Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://chetandalal.net/posts/deleting-alerts-improved-reliability/The instinct after an incident is to add an alert. The higher-value move is usually deleting three that have never led to action — and here’s how to make that argument without losing it.https://chetandalal.net/posts/retries-are-misused/Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://chetandalal.net/posts/retries-are-misused/Retries are the first resilience pattern everyone adds and the one most likely to cause the outage it was meant to prevent. The mechanics of retry storms, and how to bound them.https://chetandalal.net/posts/data-problems-in-disguise/Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://chetandalal.net/posts/data-problems-in-disguise/The incident looks like an application bug for the first hour. Why data failures propagate silently, why they cost more than outages, and what treating data quality as an availability concern changes.https://chetandalal.net/posts/observability-cardinality-cost/Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://chetandalal.net/posts/observability-cardinality-cost/Every label you add to a metric multiplies its cost. The failure mode is gradual, invisible, and ends in a budget review — here’s how to decide what not to measure.https://chetandalal.net/posts/hello-world/Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://chetandalal.net/posts/hello-world/