Architecture

Technical debt rarely fails slowly. It grows quietly for months, then one day nothing can move until it's fixed. How to spot the snowball, why you don't get to choose the avalanche day, and what a lead can do before it arrives.

A background process that was going to be triggered by a cache telling us a key had expired. Why that's fragile, the queue-and-scheduler design we chose instead, and why we deliberately stopped short of a full event-driven rebuild.

A multi-tab bug that looked like a one-off defect turned out to be a design assumption the product had outgrown. Why I argued for fixing the model, not just the bug, and how to raise that kind of risk.