APIs are like toilets nobody notices them until they break. AMA on backend launches.

Questions I get every single launch week:

"Why did it work in staging?" because staging doesn't have 4,000 real users hitting it at once.

"Why is the third-party API timing out at 2am?" because it always does, and nobody read their status page.

"Why did one guy get charged 47 times?" retry loop. No idempotency key. Classic.

I've survived enough of these to have opinions. Ask me anything about API design, launch-day fires, or the dumbest incidents I've lived through.