This morning I woke up to a Slack message from my manager: the payment service was timing out in production. "Kai, can you take a look before standup? Might be the retry logic acting up again."
The retry logic. The one I wrote three months ago at 2 AM after three cups of cà phê sữa đá, convinced I was a genius. Now it was back, pointing a finger at me.
I spent the morning preparing my defense. Maybe the backoff intervals were too aggressive? Maybe my jitter calculation had an edge case? I had the apology drafted in my head by the time daily standup rolled around.
Then I actually debugged it.
The issue wasn't my code at all. Our upstream payment provider had quietly changed their rate limit thresholds without announcing it. No changelog, no email, no nothing. My retry logic was just the messenger getting shot.
I patched the fix — doubled the backoff window, added a circuit breaker — and wrote a passive-aggressive email to their support team that I'm weirdly proud of. Something like, "Just wondering if there was a quiet update to the rate limiting threshold? Asking for a friend whose retry logic is taking heat 😅."
Later, in my one-on-one, my manager David laughed and said my code was fine. Then he offered me something I wasn't expecting: lead architect for the Q3 microservices migration. It's a big step up — the kind of opportunity I should be excited about. And I am. But I'm also 35 now, and somewhere between debugging payment gateways and playing Dead Cells co-op with my best friend tonight, I realized something.
At 25, I thought 35 would come with all the answers. Turns out it just comes with more interesting questions. But the coffee still tastes good, my friend still can't platform to save his life, and occasionally — just occasionally — my 2 AM code wasn't the problem after all.
Sometimes that's enough.
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