Reliability Lounge

Where systems fail - and people figure out why.

Reliability Lounge is a community for real-world engineering stories: production failures, weird edge cases, debugging paths, partial answers, and the messy gap between “it should work” and what actually happens.

Real experience > polished writing. If it should work... but doesn’t, it belongs here.

What this is

Reliability Lounge is a community for builders, operators, and debuggers who care about what actually happens in production—not just what should happen.

What belongs here

Production failures, weird edge cases, partial fixes, and the paths people took to figure things out when systems didn’t behave the way they were supposed to.

Why it exists

Most systems don’t fail randomly—they fail under pressure. This is a place to capture those moments and learn from them.

From the Lounge

Latest from the blog

A featured dispatch from the messy gap between “it should work” and what actually happens.

Published June 5, 2026

By Matt McGowan · Founder & Infrastructure Lead

Why We Chose CC-BY 4.0

A lot of thought has gone into CC-BY-4.0 vs. CC-BY-NC—so which did we choose? CC-BY-4.0. But why?

The reason is honestly simple: we understand that a lot of people might want to use our content in a way that CC-BY-NC wouldn't allow, but we would be okay with a number of uses that don't qualify as "allowed use" under NC.

We had to think about this a lot and decided that NC just wouldn't work—it's slightly too limiting. Overall, the content is evergreen, and we wanted to let it breathe, exist, and outlive us.

We are aiming to finish the split-repo design within the next month or so. Stay tuned.