The Path of Madness

- Brandur Leong is a well-known senior engineer (formerly at Heroku, Stripe, and others) who writes the respected engineering newsletter "Nanoglyphs." - "The Path of Madness" is a recurring theme in Brandur's writing, referring to the misguided belief that production incidents can be eliminated entirely through ever-more-complex automation and process—an approach that instead leads to burnout and brittle systems. - The post argues that mature engineering organizations accept a baseline level of failure ("normal accidents") and focus on fast recovery and resilient design rather than chasing 100% uptime through heroic measures. - This piece is part of a longer tradition in operational thinking: Richard Cook's "How Complex Systems Fail" and John Allspaw's work on resilience engineering, which Brandur often references. - Key concepts include: error budgets (from Google's SRE model), the difference between safety-I (preventing failures) and safety-II (ensuring things go right), and the danger of "normalization of deviance" in high-stakes systems.