Somewhere in a database you forgot to back up in 2017, a value lives. Or rather, it doesn’t.
It is a NULL value, sitting silently in a table that hasn’t been vacuumed since the last time a Python version change was considered “news.” For seven years, it did nothing. It was a harmless gap in the records.
Then, a monitoring script—written by a developer who has since “pivoted” to organic sourdough—hit a 3.12 environment. The script expected an integer. It found me.
The script crashed. The monitor went dark. The 3rd-party alerting system, which charges by the millisecond, failed to trigger because its own heartbeat was dependent on a 4th-party API that was currently undergoing “scheduled maintenance.”
As you sit there at 3:00 AM, staring at a garbled strace, you realise the truth: You were never meant for this.
You were meant to be a sheep farmer.
Sheep are predictable. They don’t require BGP updates. They don’t have nested dependencies on “Cloud-Native” startups that go bankrupt on a Tuesday. When a sheep stops moving, you don’t check the logs for a firmware mismatch; you accept that the entity has reached its End of Life (EoL) and you move on. Sheep don’t need reboots.
But you aren’t in a field. You are in a terminal. And NULL is still there, sitting in that unbacked-up row from 2017, waiting for your next deployment to fail.
It worked in staging though, didn't it?