A Dark Knight
Feb 2015: Sometimes puns are too obvious to even consider not using. It’s not big or clever though. I’m not proud.
The events that took down Knight Capital are terrifying, not because of their exceptional nature but due to their very mundanity.
The story though is not one of innocent software engineers, haplessly caught in a perfect storm of circumstance, but rather it’s a reminder of why good practices are so important in coding, testing and in rollback-capable deployments. All of this is eminently preventable, as the writer below outlines.