Top all-time · #2547
Doug Seven
Personal blog · dougseven.comprogrammingcareer
Doug Seven's personal blog at dougseven.com covers programming and career. Since 2011, 30 different Hacker News readers have linked it 34 times, most often “Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (20) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters mostly link dougseven.com's 2014 'Knightmare' post on the $440M Knight Capital trading loss, using it to illustrate DevOps risks such as untested deployments and feature flags.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 20 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Something can be learned in the course of observing things
Most-linked posts?
- Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)18 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2016-07-26
- Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2014-04-26
What Hacker News says?
> ...then don't spend hundreds of thousands on infrastructure. I find it curious how we went from doing the basics of software development that would minimize risks and be helpful to almost any project out there to this. To clarify, i agree with the point that you'll need to prioritize different components based on what matters the most, but i don't think that you can't have a common standard set of tools and practi…
Comment linking /2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale
on “Don't start with microservices – monoliths are your friend”Submitted Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014) as a story · 207 points
HN discussionhttps://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-caution...
Comment linking /2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/
on “Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?”Submitted Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014) as a story · 120 points
HN discussion> Another concern I have is that if a feature toggle isn't enabled in production for a long time (for us, several days is already a long time due to a tight release schedule) new changes to the codebase by another team can conflict with the disabled feature and, since it's disabled, you probably won't know there's a problem until it's too late? Reminiscent of Knight Capital losing $440 million in 45 minutes via feat…
Comment linking /2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/
on “We don’t use a staging environment”Submitted Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale as a story · 101 points
HN discussionPersonally, i just use containers to manage business applications - which often need a very particular runtime that's tested, verified and signed off on for maximum stability and predictable deployments. On the other hand, i only use standard packages through apt/yum/apk/whatever for server software , a distinction that's lost too often in my opinion. Everything that the server needs to operate should have automatic…
Comment linking /2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/
on “Which version of JDK should I use?”Submitted $400M in assets to bankrupt in 45-minutes because of a failed deployment (2014) as a story · 25 points
HN discussion> A container is just a fancy executable. Not just that, but containers also have a lot of knowledge and tooling around them for running services more painlessly. I suggest that you familiarize yourself with this excellent site: https://12factor.net/ > No one ever talked about "executable orchestration". Actually thousands of collective developer-years have gone into developing Java EE, OSGi and also figuring out ho…
Comment linking /2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/
on “Don't use Kubernetes yet”Submitted How a failed deployment made a $400m company bankrupt in 45-minutes as a story · 5 points
HN discussionInteresting. Five years prior, this story was posted on this blog: https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-caution...
Comment linking /2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/
on “The $440M software error at Knight Capital (2019)”Submitted A company with $400M in assets went bankrupt in 45-minutes as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> We know from observing reality that even buggy software is better than no software – a software so buggy it adds negative value is a rare exception. So I guess it has to be "sub-linear", otherwise software wouldn't have economies of scale. I'm not sure about this, our e-health system had millions spent on it and eventually still was discarded, after "sort of" working for months and slowing down all of the doctors…
Comment linking /2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/
on “Size is the best predictor of code quality (2011)”Submitted Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere's a large category of complex systems where you have to get it right in advance because of the consequences of problems; anything avionics or real-time, for example. Or you can lose a lot of money without blowing things up but still faster than the on-call humans can respond: https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-caution... (High-reliability engineering is very much a different, more expensive,…
Comment linking /2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/
on “Developer on Call”Submitted Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou should be patient and kind with everyone. Although, patient and kind does not included adding untested code to production to "fix" something late on a Sunday night. Insisting on proper deployment almost always makes developers[1] irritable. It also prevents http://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautiona... 1) I have more years as a developer than system admin (11 vs 7 and 5 as something I'm still n…
Comment linking /2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/
on “Ask HN: How do I learn how to become a good sysadmin?”Submitted Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAbsolutely, just like with software engineering missing the edge cases can drive you out of business. https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-caution... I am not sure why people think that cloud is magically will shield them from every bad decision.
Comment linking /2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/
on “How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase”Submitted Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale as a story · 1 points
HN discussion"This couldn’t be further from the truth. The use of HTML5 + JavaScript in Windows 8 is about as proprietary as using XAML + .NET." http://dougseven.com/2011/10/24/language-choice-in-windows-8... Just because it uses JS doesn't mean its portable! It has proprietary APIS + hooks making it non portable.
Comment linking /2011/10/24/language-choice-in-windows-8-is-not-about-portability/
on “Microsoft Open Sources their Entity Framework ORM”Submitted Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMy favorite disaster of all time: http://fortune.com/2012/08/02/why-knight-lost-440-million-in... More details with references: https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-caution...
Comment linking /2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/
on “IRS: Review of the System Failure That Led to the Tax Day Outage [pdf]”Submitted Knightmare: A Devops Cautionary Tale (2014) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion$400 million down the drain http://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautiona...
Comment linking /2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/
on “BitBucket was down”Submitted A DevOps Cautionary Tale as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIndeed: http://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautiona...
Comment linking /2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/
on “Why Health Care Tech Is Still So Bad”Submitted I Know What You’re Thinking, and You’re Wrong as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe risk of feature flags is well illustrated by the downfall of Knight Capital Group: https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-caution...
Comment linking /2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/
on “Dear Staging: We’re Done”I've worked on high frequency trading software infrastructure, including having been involved in serious bugs which lead to a lot of broken trades and lost money, and would have said with anything like proper architecture and governance you can't lose $400 million in 30 minutes. But Knight Capital did manage to lose $440 million in 45 minutes, due in large part to what I would call improper architecture and governan…
Comment linking /2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/amp/
on “Windows for Submarines (2008)”
