The Engineering Discipline Western Software Often Misses
There's a habit in Western software culture that I didn't notice until I started building on both sides of it. When you're shipping a product in a market with reliable broadband, stable power, and users on the latest iPhone, reliability becomes something you tackle after launch. You get the features out, prove the concept, find product-market fit, then circle back to harden the edges. Retry logic, offline states, graceful degradation: those are version two problems.
I built software that way for a while. Then I spent years building payment systems for users in Lagos, Nairobi, and other parts of West Africa, and that entire mental model collapsed.
In those markets, reliability isn't something you bolt on later. It's the product. Full stop. And building that way didn't just change how I think about resilience. It changed how I think about software entirely.
What "unreliable" actually means at scale
Before getting...
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