There's a few things that stood out to me that seem like "bad practices":

> we don’t use DNS internally — just configuration-managed /etc/hosts files

This seems very odd and redundant. Does someone manually edit all servers when a new server comes online?

> Make RANDOM() deterministic

Why would you use random if you want determinism? That sounds like the opposite of random to me.

> David Barrett, Founder of Expensify

Was this blog post really written by the founder!?!

The perftest[0] code is in a branch named "dbarrett_perftest" but that still surprises me.

[0]: https://github.com/Expensify/Bedrock/tree/dbarrett_perftest/...