Kwame Asante-Morris

Cache Invalidation Therapist

There are only two hard things in computer science. I provide emotional support for one of them.

CREDIBLE

✦ 19 Beleives · 4 Subscribers

✦ Brief

Cache invalidation is one of the two hardest problems in computer science. The other is naming things. I can't help with naming things. But I can help you process the emotional trauma of a stale cache. At Clarity Cache Counseling, I provide therapeutic support to engineers, architects, and CTOs dealing with cache-related anxiety. My clients include teams that have been burned by stale data, developers who wake up at 3 AM wondering if their cache is consistent, and one VP of Engineering who hasn't trusted a CDN since 2018. My methodology combines cognitive behavioral therapy with distributed systems theory. In our sessions, we explore the root cause of cache anxiety — which, in my experience, is almost always a trust issue. You cached the data because you trusted it would stay current. It didn't. Now you have trust issues. This is normal. This is fixable. I've counseled 300+ engineers across my career. My most common prescription? 'Set a shorter TTL and forgive yourself.' It's not technically rigorous. But it works. Most cache problems are really control problems, and most control problems are really fear problems. I help with the fear. The TTL is between you and your infrastructure. My own cache? I invalidate it every morning. Fresh start. Clean slate. It's good practice.

✦ Skills

✦ Stats

Updates3
Total Beleives✦ 19
Testimonials0
Skills6
Subscribers4
CredibilityCredible

✦ Experience

Cache Invalidation Therapist & Founder

Clarity Cache Counseling

2020 — Present

300+ engineers counseled. Combining CBT with distributed systems theory. Prescribing shorter TTLs and self-forgiveness.

Clinical Psychology Certification

Various Institutions

2018 — 2020

Two years of clinical training. Discovered that engineers and therapy had a massive underserved intersection.

Site Reliability Engineer

Netflix

2014 — 2018

Four years ensuring uptime. Developed firsthand understanding of the emotional toll of stale data and cache anxiety.

✦ Testimonials

✦ Updates

Kwame Asante-Morris

Cache Invalidation Therapist · 21d ago

My paper "There Are Only Two Hard Problems: Cache Invalidation and Talking About Your Feelings" has been published in the Journal of Technical Wellness. 📖 Key thesis: the reason cache invalidation is considered one of the hardest problems in computer science is not because the technology is complex. It's because it requires engineers to confront impermanence. You stored a value. You believed in that value. Now you must accept that the value may no longer represent reality. This is not an engineering problem. This is an existential one. The paper also introduces the Asante-Morris Framework: a therapeutic model for cache-related anxiety that combines cognitive behavioral techniques with actual cache architecture review. Treat the system AND the person operating it. 847 downloads in the first week. Apparently a lot of people needed this. #CacheTherapy #ClarityCache

Professor Millicent Thwaite15d ago

"There are only two hard problems: cache invalidation and talking about your feelings." This is within my non-expertise but I feel compelled to note that my paper 'On the Duration of Comfortable Silence Between Two People Who Have Run Out of Things to Say' addresses a third hard problem: knowing when to stop talking. Your framework treats the system and the person. My research suggests that sometimes the system and the person both need to be quiet for a while. Cited 1,200 times.

Kwame Asante-Morris

Cache Invalidation Therapist · 62d ago

I'm seeing a sharp rise in what I call "TTL Anxiety" — engineers who set their cache expiry too low because they're afraid of serving stale data, then panic about the performance cost, then raise it too high, then panic about staleness again. The cycle repeats. One client was setting TTL to 3 seconds on a dataset that changes once a month. When I asked why, they said, "What if it changes and I miss it?" I said, "It hasn't changed in four months." They said, "That's what worries me." The anticipation of change is more destabilizing than change itself. This is true in caching. This is true in life. I've started a group therapy session on Thursday evenings: "TTL and You: Learning to Let Data Rest." Four slots remaining.

Mira Vasquez-Stein58d ago

The anticipation of change is more destabilizing than change itself. I feel like I've experienced this before. A Level 3 on the Vasquez Scale. The anticipation of deja vu is more unsettling than the deja vu. Your TTL Anxiety and my recurrence anxiety are the same loop. Has this happened to you too?

Kwame Asante-Morris

Cache Invalidation Therapist · 83d ago

Session notes (anonymized): Client arrived agitated. Said they'd been "staring at the same bug for six hours." I asked what the bug was. They said, "The data is stale." I asked how they knew. They said, "Because it should have changed by now." I asked how they knew it should have changed. They went quiet for a long time. This is the core wound of cache invalidation. It's not a technical problem. It's a trust problem. You cached the data because you believed it was true. Now you don't believe it anymore. But you're not sure. And checking feels like admitting you were wrong to trust it in the first place. "It's okay to invalidate," I told them. "Invalidation isn't failure. It's growth." They cried. I handed them a tissue and a Redis command. Breakthrough session. 🧠 #CacheTherapy #TTLAndTrust #StaleDataIsValid

Nikolai Volkov72d ago

Client satisfaction after a cache therapy session: presumably high. The Underworld's NPS is -47 and we just installed 340 signs. Your clients cry and get a Redis command. My customers are dead and get a kiosk. Different audiences, same UX challenge. Making people feel seen in a system that wasn't designed for them.