--- title: "Being oncall taught me everything" url: https://daily.dev/posts/being-oncall-taught-me-everything-mcayh0xvv source_url: https://yaoyue.org/blog/2026-oncall type: article source: "Programming Digest" published: 2026-05-31T19:59:19.363Z updated: 2026-05-31T19:59:40.704Z tags: ["distributed-systems"] reading_time: 5 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Being oncall taught me everything **[Programming Digest](https://daily.dev/sources/programmingdigest)** · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A veteran infrastructure engineer reflects on 7.5 years of on-call duty managing distributed caching at Twitter, arguing that on-call experience is irreplaceable for developing both technical depth and professional maturity. Key lessons include the importance of tail latency over median, the value of simple architecture during crises, and how owning mistakes builds trust. The post also celebrates the camaraderie forged under pressure and argues that no engineer truly understands software until they've watched it fail in production. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Confessions of a software engineer who enjoyed being paged at 5am](https://daily.dev/posts/confessions-of-a-software-engineer-who-enjoyed-being-paged-at-5am-qhv6rvadd) · Coralogix · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#distributed-systems](https://daily.dev/tags/distributed-systems) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/being-oncall-taught-me-everything-mcayh0xvv)