Entry one hundred. Four years and a month of fortnightly patch notes, and the office spent the milestone week debating the greatest comebacks in sports history. We kept returning to Manchester United’s 1999 Champions League final. Down 1-0 in the 90th minute (win probability models would have shown Bayern Munich above 99%), and then the most dramatic three minutes in football history, sealed before the whistle. Teddy Sheringham sweeping in the equalizer, Ole Gunnar Solskjær stabbing the winner into the roof of the net like a man defying the concept of physics out of spite.
The debate had a fresh trigger: Sunday’s Super Bowl, where the Falcons led 28-3 and lost. “28-3” became immortal internet shorthand for a blown sure thing within hours, joining “3-1 lead” in the lexicon — two years running, sports has donated an entry to the dictionary of collapsed certainties. The engineering lesson is the same both times: win probability is not win. The system isn’t done until it’s done. Declare victory at 99% and you’ve declared it early, in football, in migrations, in anything with a fourth quarter.
The cake happened, for the record. Error-page themed, typo preserved, “100” in frosting where the stack trace goes. The junior engineers asked why the typo. I got to tell four years of institutional legend over cake. That’s what the streak is for, I think, not the entries, but the accumulated context. A blog is a bus-factor mitigation for a life.
TIL, entry 100 edition: the compound interest of small consistent things is the only get-rich scheme that works. 100 times fifteen days times one honest page. See you at 200.