Stories the data in this site tells

Most articles here answer a question. A few do something else: they put other articles in an order that argues something none of them says alone. A category list sorts by subject, and these are sorted by argument, so this is the only page where they appear together.

9 of them, grouped by what they argue.

How things break, and what to decide first

The failure cases sorted by where the fault actually lived, the interval between someone knowing and everyone knowing, and the five practices those cases argue for. The first two collect the evidence; the third is what to do about it.

• How systems fail: a reader's map to the cases in this catalogue

  Nine failures, sorted not by industry or decade but by where the failure actually lived - in a safeguard someone removed, an assumption that expired, a rollback, a boundary between two organisations, a decision about what to say. Read as a set they stop being anecdotes and start being a checklist of the places to look.

• Decided in advance: the five practices the failures argue for

  Two companion pages collect what broke and what got said. This one is the third question: what has to be decided before anything happens, because it cannot be decided during. Five practices, each paired with the case that demonstrates the cost of not having it - a baseline, a blast radius, a change window, a restorable backup, and a boundary.

• The disclosure record: what happened between finding it and saying it

  Every case in this catalogue has an interval in it - between the moment someone knew and the moment anyone else did. Sometimes it was six hours and sometimes it was a decade. This page collects the cases where that interval decided the outcome, and what each one settled about coordinating, withholding, publishing and being believed.

One thing, followed end to end

A request, a service, an answer and a format, each traced through articles that were written to stand alone. Read in sequence they describe a path rather than a topic.

• F5 Distributed Cloud: one request, end to end

  Fifteen articles on F5 Distributed Cloud, read in the order a request meets them: how a site joins the fabric, where the request lands, which route it takes, where it is sent, how it is encrypted, whether it is allowed, how much of it is tolerated, what it may call, what it leaves behind, and what is silently wrong with the configuration that handled it.

• Extreme Fabric Connect: one service, edge to edge

  Nine articles on Extreme's fabric, read in the order a service comes into existence: which operating system, what the words mean, what the fabric is, how the nodes know each other, how a service rides the backbone, why multicast needs no configuration, how the edge asks for what it needs, and how the edge is dual-homed without spanning tree. The organising fact is the one the fabric is built on - a service is provisioned at the edge, not trunked hop by hop.

• Reading a DNS answer: the line you skipped is the diagnosis

  Fourteen articles on dig and nslookup, arranged as a single answer read from the top: who actually replied, whether they were authoritative or repeating a cache, what the flags admit, what the OPT line is doing there, what the records say, what a failure code means, and how to walk the delegation yourself when the resolver's answer cannot be trusted. Most DNS misdiagnoses are not a misunderstanding of DNS. They are a line that was not read.

• The formats in between: why every interchange bug is the same bug

  JSON, YAML, XML, timestamps, text encodings, base64, URLs, diffs. They look like separate topics with separate reference pages. They are one topic: each is a convention for putting meaning into a string so that something else can take it out again, and almost every defect in the set is the two ends disagreeing about what came out.

The industry and the country

Where the subject is not the technology but the business around it, and the place it was learned in.

• The industry, from inside: six articles on how this business actually works

  Who founds the companies, how a product travels from the people who build it to the people who depend on it, what the role in the middle of that path does all day, what a customer is really buying when they buy transformation, and what every appliance on the estate is running underneath. Six articles that are not about any vendor, read in the order a career meets them.

• The Brazil thread: six articles that only make sense together

  A market reserve that produced clones and smuggling, a governance model that was multistakeholder before the word existed, a hacker culture that began in a social-justice NGO, a criminal industry shaped to payment instruments no other country had, a data protection law with ten legal bases and a three-day clock, and the fortnight a supreme court stopped. Read separately they are country facts. Read in order they are one argument about what happens when a large country builds its own internet.

Each one is an ordinary article and can be read on its own. What makes it a story is that it was written to be read after the pieces it points at, or instead of hunting for them.