Nothing Alerted, Because Nothing Happened

Every alert you have is built around something going wrong. A pod crashes, a request errors, a metric crosses a line. Something occurs, and the occurrence is what fires the alert. Now think about a nightly backup that just stops running. There'…

The Diff Does Not Contain the Consequences

A reviewer opens a pull request and sees what changed. Files, lines, additions in green. What they cannot see is what happens next. Which services call this. Whether a mobile client parses that field strictly. Whether an overnight batch job reads the …

Kubernetes Accepted It. That Doesn't Mean It Works.

kubectl apply came back clean. Service created. Deployment rolled out. Pods running. And every request returns 503. The thing that took me a while to accept about Kubernetes is that a manifest being valid says almost nothing about whether it c…

Your Incident Probably Did Not Have a Root Cause

Read enough postmortems and you notice they all end the same way. One box, one sentence, usually naming a deployment. Root cause: bad deploy. It is tidy, it closes the ticket, and it is almost always an incomplete account of what happened. Worse, it q…

Is It Us, or Is It Them?

Checkout starts failing. Before anyone can fix anything, somebody has to answer one question, and everything downstream depends on it. Is this our code, or is a provider having a bad day? If it's ours, you're rolling back or shipping a fix…

Similar Code Is Not Connected Code

Ask an embedding-based system which code relates to PaymentService and you will get back things that look like PaymentService . Other payment classes. Functions with payment in the name. A test file. Possibly a payment integration in a completely dif…

I Shipped It. Six Months Later I Couldn't Explain It.

A bug came in on something I'd written. My name on the commit, my PR, merged and running for months. I opened the file and had no idea how it worked. Not a vague memory that needed refreshing. Genuinely blank. I'd reviewed that code, I'…

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