Best practices promise safety through repetition, yet experienced engineers often feel discomfort long before they can explain why. This essay explores why rules that once made sense can quietly lose their meaning, and why judgment begins where best practices end.
Most systems aren’t truly managed; they are merely monitored for failure while we fly with the windows blacked out. True observability isn’t just about logs and traces—it’s the instrumentation that turns an open-loop guess into a closed-loop system you can actually control.
Why painful tradeoffs are often a sign of a poorly modeled problem — not a hard decision.