Hands-on experience with systems reveals their critical failure modes

Arpit Bhayani

Arpit Bhayani

Jun 26, 2026 • 1 min read


Reading a tutorial and terms like exponential backoff, jitter, and idempotency keys makes sense. Then you build the thing, the API returns a 500, and you watch your system crash.

The happy path is the part everyone writes about. The request succeeds, the response looks like the example, and the system behaves. That is maybe 20% of the actual code you end up shipping.

The other 80% is what you only discover by running the thing under real conditions. A queue that is supposed to be FIFO but is not under load, a dependency that is “always available” until it is not, or a database connection pool that gets exhausted when 3 slow queries stack up during a deploy.

Hence, reading 10 blog posts about a system is no substitute for spending a weekend building it. The bugs you hit while building it (or, better yet, while running it in production) are the actual curriculum. The blog post is just the syllabus.

Reading teaches the happy path. Building teaches the failure modes. So keep coding and keep shipping.

Arpit Bhayani

Principal Engineer II at Razorpay - building Agent Studio, Ex-staff engg at GCP Memorystore & Dataproc, Creator of DiceDB, ex-Amazon Fast Data, ex-Director of Engg. SRE and Data Engineering at Unacademy. I spark engineering curiosity through my no-fluff engineering videos on YouTube and my courses