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Hi, I'm Kate

I’m a Full Stack Developer and Engineering Mentor, obsessed with regular expressions, books, and web technologies. In my work, I mix old with new, soft with hard, cats with dogs. When it’s not a disaster, it’s pure magic!

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Week of December 1, 2025: Retry Storm

One great example of this behavior is retries. If you’re only looking at your day-to-day error rate metric, you can be lead to believe that adding more retries makes systems better because it makes the error rate go down. However, the same change can make systems more vulnerable, by converting small outages into sudden (and metastable) periods of internal retry storms.

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