Ninety-seven entries. Four years, zero missed. The streak is my longest-running production system.
2016’s thesis, and it wasn’t subtle: every model broke. Leicester City won the Premier League at 5000-to-1, the single least probable result in team sports history, and I never even blogged it because I didn’t believe it in May. Hamilton lost the title despite a rain-delayed heroic run as Rosberg took the crown and retired five days later. England fell to Iceland’s defensive block. Brexit beat the polls; the election beat the polls; AlphaGo beat the species. If your priors survived 2016 intact, you weren’t paying attention or you weren’t betting. The out-of-distribution events are the only ones that matter, and this year was all distribution tails, all the time.
My year, senior edition: promoted, rebuilt CI (40 minutes down to 14), designed an interview loop, prevented two features, shipped a dozen, and learned that the job is increasingly performed in meetings, wielding documents, and I’ve made peace with that because the documents work. Proverbs file: 118 entries. Fantasy PL: champion. Null Pointer Exception hoists the trophy in year four. The group chat has demanded a recount. There will be no recount.
Next sprint (2017): the Switch arrives in March and I will preorder the minute they let me. Kubernetes is winning the orchestration war and I should stop pretending otherwise (“we don’t have Google’s problems” was true until our third availability zone; that old bookmark comes due). And this blog turns 100 entries old in February. Might buy it a cake. Error-page themed. You know the one.
The graphs are flat. Happy holidays from on-call, year four. The streak continues.