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  • Message versioning, and the field added five years ago

    An additive-only message policy, and an optional field from 2021 that every consumer now requires. An optional field that everybody depends on is a required field with no…

  • A drill that induced the same failure deliberately

    The April incident reproduced on purpose in May, to check whether the fix worked. Reproducing an incident deliberately is the only way to know a fix works, and…

  • Split-brain, and the check that refuses to promote

    A manual failover, and a guard against the case where the old primary is still writing. Refusing to promote while the old primary answers is the check that…

  • The certificate scan, two quarters on

    A quarterly scan of our own address space, after the first run found two things nobody owned. The first run of a scan like this finds the accumulated…

  • Mutation testing on a third directory, and a worse score

    A technique applied to a third directory, with a score of thirty-eight per cent and a good reason. A low score on code whose correctness is asserted at…

  • A component gallery that renders every state

    A page rendering every component in every state, which is what finally let somebody else change the stylesheet. The states are the point rather than the components —…

  • Editors changing things, measured over three years

    A count of content and design changes made without a developer, before and after the site editor migration. Forty-one tickets a year becoming two is the return on…

  • An event with no consumer, published for the last time

    An event dispatched on every order since 2021, subscribed to by a module that no longer exists. The monthly report had been correct since the module was discontinued…

  • The reporting database that is not a replica

    A read replica serving reports, and reports that want a different schema. Eleven indexes on production tables that exist only for reporting.

  • Schema as a resource rather than as a tool

    The protocol distinguishes things that are read from things that are called, and a schema is the first. Exposing the schema as a resource rather than as a…