Juhan Polinert

We integrate with a third-party accounting API. Between March and September, the integration failed in production three separate times. Here is what happened each time:

Failure 1 March 14. API returned a 200 with an empty body instead of an error code. Our code assumed 200 meant success. We wrote null values into 47 customer records. Took 9 days to notice because no alert fired. Fix: validate response body, not just status code.

Failure 2 June 2. The vendor changed their rate limit from 100 requests per minute to 60 without updating their changelog. We hit the limit during a bulk sync, got throttled, and queued 2,300 jobs that never retried. Took 4 days to notice. Fix: exponential backoff and a dead-letter queue with a daily digest.

Failure 3 August 21. Their OAuth token expiry changed from 90 days to 30 days. We cached tokens and refreshed every 60 days. Every customer's connection silently broke on day 31. Took 6 hours to notice because a customer emailed us.

The last two days, I had some personal problems and spent basically the whole time trying to solve them.

And during that time I did no work, no posts, no ideas, no inspiration, nothing... =D

Just me, solving my own puzzle !

For me, I finish the tasks I didn t complete during the week, then try to get ahead on a few things.

And I always finish my weekend by preparing my tasks for the next week.

I know some founders completely disconnect on weekends, but I ve never really managed to do that

What about you? Do you work on weekends or completely switch off?