Ownership over Blame Accountability creates progress. Blame creates fear. I remember the morning by the silence. Not the peaceful kind—the brittle kind. The kind where dashboards stop updating, batch logs stop ticking, and no one wants to be the first to ask what’s wrong. I refreshed our monitoring tool three times. Then a fourth. The overnight load hadn’t landed. The tables were stale. And I knew before opening Slack that something upstream had buckled. ...
Empathy over Ego Code is read more than written. Be human. Five years ago, I wrote a data parser that still runs today. It handled edge cases nobody warned us about. Took flat files from a vendor who’d never heard of schemas. Normalized everything into tidy rows for the warehouse. At the time, I was proud of how concise it was. It had no third-party dependencies. It used clever recursion, tight loops, and a few expressions I knew would confuse anyone who hadn’t been knee-deep in it for months. ...
Observability over Assumptions You can’t fix what you can’t see. Instrument everything. We don’t run refineries—we build the equipment they depend on. Industrial process heating systems aren’t glamorous, but they’re essential. Our gear—massive reboilers, convective heaters, thermal loops—sits at the core of petroleum refining. Designed for uptime, engineered for heat transfer efficiency, optimized for brutal conditions. One of our newer dual-fuel heater models had just gone live at a Gulf Coast site. The commissioning reports were clean. Control systems tuned. Ramp-up curve as expected. But seven weeks later, our account manager forwarded an urgent message from their ops team. ...
I don’t remember the first time someone called it “the magic mart,” but by the time I joined the team, the name had stuck. It was our crown jewel—a data mart built ten years ago, blessed and burdened by legacy wisdom, and surrounded by a reverent fog of mystery. No one could tell you exactly how it worked. But it worked. Mostly. And that, apparently, was enough. “Don’t touch the mart,” they’d say. “It’s been blessed.” ...
Lesson Learned: In fast-moving environments, even experienced teams are tempted to rely on trust over test coverage. This story isn’t about blame—it’s about how a small, well-meaning change nearly caused large-scale downstream decisions to be made on false data. Testing removes doubt. Skipping it invites disaster. The first time I felt a system wobble—not crash, not alert, just wobble—it started with silence. No errors. No warnings. Just dashboards that “mostly looked right.” ...