Ramblings of an aging IT geek
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personal

three hundred miles and an episode i didn't want to end

A long motorway drive made better by a single engineering podcast episode about a postmortem, and a small note on why I prefer the war stories to the news.

A coffee cup beside a stack of books

I did a long drive at the weekend, the kind that's three hours of motorway and a service-station coffee in the middle, and the thing that carried me through it was a single podcast episode. One of those engineering postmortem shows where someone walks through an outage in unhurried detail: what alerted, what they assumed, why the assumption was wrong, and the small human moment where the actual cause clicked into place.

What I like about the war-story format, as opposed to the news-and-releases sort of tech podcast, is that nobody's selling anything. There's no roadmap, no "exciting announcement", just an engineer being honest about a day that went sideways and what they understood afterwards. I learn more from one well-told failure than from a month of release notes, and it's better company on a grey stretch of the M6.

The episode outlasted the motorway, which is the highest praise I can give it. I sat in the car park at the far end for the last ten minutes rather than pause it and lose the thread. If you've got a long drive coming up, find a good postmortem and let someone else's bad day make yours a bit shorter.