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What happens if we stop retrying?

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The retry is the most confident line of code we write. Think about what it claims: the same request, sent again, will produce a different outcome. Sometimes that’s true — a dropped packet, a node mid-restart. But we don’t retry because we’ve established that. We retry because it’s easy and it usually looks like it works.

So, the thought experiment: what happens if we stop?

Take a service that’s slow because it’s overloaded. Callers time out and retry. Each retry is a brand-new request the service must also fail, which makes it slower, which causes more timeouts, which causes more retries. We have a name for this — a retry storm — and yet we keep writing the loop, because each individual retry looks reasonable. It’s the traffic jam problem: nobody thinks they’re the traffic.

Why does this site exist?

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a fair question, and I’d rather answer it before someone else asks.

Most personal sites exist because someone read that they should have one. Personal brand, visibility, that whole industry. That’s not this. I have no intention of building a brand; I already have a name, and it’s done fine so far.

Here’s the actual reason. I think by asking questions. Not the rhetorical kind you deploy in meetings to sound clever, but the kind that comes out of a thought experiment: why is this system behaving this way? Maybe it’s the cache. Alright, suppose it is the cache — then what should happen if we turn it off? And when you turn it off and the behaviour doesn’t change, you’ve learned something worth writing down.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

About

I’m a software engineer. I’ve spent my career building systems, watching them fail in interesting ways, and trying to understand the gap between how we say software works and how it actually does.

I’m South African, which means “I’ll do it now” comes in three distinct tenses — now, just now, and now-now — and none of them mean immediately. It’s good training for distributed systems: everything is eventually consistent, including me.