Blog
Notes on monitoring, silent failures, and the specific ways things quietly break.
September 22, 2026
3 Ways Your Green Dashboard Is Lying to You
A green status doesn't mean what you think it means. Three specific, common gaps between what a health check actually measures and what you assumed it was measuring.
September 22, 2026
How One Flaky API Call Turned Into 14,412 Silent Retries
An agent's retry logic had backoff but no cap. One degraded upstream API call turned into 14,412 retries over a weekend — no crash, no alert, just steady 'normal-looking' traffic until the bill showed up.
September 22, 2026
Livelock vs. Crash: Why "It's Still Running" Doesn't Mean It's Working
A crashed process is the easy case — something tells you. A livelocked one just sits there, technically alive, doing nothing useful, and looking identical to a healthy run on any dashboard that only checks "is it running."
September 22, 2026
The Cron Bug That Only Happens Twice a Year
A cron schedule anchored to local time doesn't just shift once a year at DST fall-back — for one specific hour, it's genuinely ambiguous which run you're in, and a job can fire twice or not at all.
September 22, 2026
The Job That "Succeeded" for 11 Days While Doing Nothing
A nightly ingestion job kept exiting 0 for 11 days straight after an upstream auth change quietly turned every response into an empty array. Nobody noticed, because nobody was watching for success that did nothing.
September 22, 2026
The Monitoring Bug Hiding in Your Check Interval
When a job occasionally runs longer than your monitoring interval, a dead job can inherit a "still running" status left over from a healthy check that started before it died — masking a failure for multiple cycles.
September 21, 2026
The Alert That Recovers Itself Is the One That Gets You
A payment-sync monitor fired and cleared 11 times in one week, always before anyone opened it. By the 12th time, the on-call channel had already learned to stop looking — which is exactly when it didn't recover.