had one last week that I couldn't reproduce locally or on staging. adding logging required a deploy, which felt sketchy when I didn't even know what I was looking for yet. ended up bumping verbosity on one prod instance and watching real traffic for about 40 minutes until it triggered

do you have a shadow/mirror env that catches these, or is it always some version of flying blind with extra logs

asking because I've got a chunk of auth logic at work that I basically wrote and maintained solo for two years. not by design, just kind of evolved that way. started getting nervous about vacation coverage and eventually wrote a doc for it but the doc got stale within like a month.

curious how other people handle the bus factor problem when it just kind of happens organically rather than being a deliberate choice

been the only dev on a backend service for about two years. finally sat down to write proper docs for it today.

found a try/except block in the job queue handler. catches one very specific exception type. does absolutely nothing with it -- no log, no reraise, no fallback. just silences it. there's no comment explaining why. no linked ticket. no slack thread I can dig up. git blame points to a commit message that says 'fix job queue issue' with no further detail.

I genuinely cannot reconstruct what I was protecting against.

if you work solo, please leave your future self a comment. even one line. it costs nothing. I am begging you.