Next up, we have a Spooky Story from Zaq Wiedmann, Sr. Infrastructure Engineer II @ Khan Academy and Sr. Infrastructure Engineer II @ Khan Academy and Kate Pond, Sr. Software Engineer @ Openly!
Another spooky work of fiction that draws from real-life experience. 
The Ghosts of Systems Past
In the dim glow of flickering monitors, the development team huddled around a table littered with empty energy drink cans and discarded cables. The air was heavy with the weight of yet another failed deployment, and the hum of servers struggling under the weight of broken code filled the room.
“Another service just crashed,” Alex muttered, scrolling through an endless stream of logs. “Fourth one this week. I swear this system is cursed.”
“Check the Kafka topics?” Sam asked, massaging their temple as the headache from staring at the screen for hours grew unbearable. “There’s probably a message jammed in there again.”
Alex groaned. “Sifting through those logs is like playing hide-and-seek with ghosts. Every lead goes cold.”
The team had inherited a system composed of dozens of microservices, each teetering on the edge of collapse. When one service fell, it would pull others down in a catastrophic cascade. Logs were scattered across different environments, tracing was non-existent, and debugging felt like trying to decipher the whispers of a haunted house.
“I heard stories about systems like this,” Maya, the newest member, whispered. “They say some developers never escape… that they get trapped, replaying the same errors over and over.”
“That’s just a myth,” Sam scoffed, but there was a tremor in their voice.
Everyone knew they were fighting something bigger than just bad code—a kind of malevolent force that seemed to conspire against them at every turn.
Late one night, when the office was nearly empty and the only sound was the hum of overworked machines, a cold draft swept through the room. The monitors flickered. On the far side of the table, something strange glimmered under the desk light: a dusty, old piece of hardware—a Ouija board, but instead of letters, the markings were arcane symbols of workflows and retries.
“What’s that?” asked Alex, squinting at it.
Maya hesitated. “I think it’s… a ouija board.”
Sam snorted. “Come on, really? We’re not that desperate.”
But Maya leaned in, running her fingers over the strange runes. “It’s said that this can guide us through the chaos. It’s supposed to reveal the hidden flows of our system, give us the answers we can’t see.”
The team exchanged nervous glances. Yet in their exhaustion and frustration, they were willing to try anything.
They gathered around the board, their hands hovering over the planchette. “How do we fix the system?” Alex whispered.
The planchette moved on its own, gliding over the surface in slow, deliberate motions. Diagrams of their architecture began appearing on the screen, as if drawn by an unseen hand. They watched in awe as their chaotic microservices were reorganized into coherent workflows, managed by something called Temporal.
With each movement, the Ouija board taught them more. It revealed secrets of retries, failure handling, and how to maintain long-running processes with ease. The tangled mess of their system began to unravel, and for the first time in months, hope flickered in their hearts.
“This… this is incredible,” Sam whispered, watching as the board demonstrated how they could track failures, manage state, and regain control over their system.
It seemed the nightmare was finally over. The team dove into implementing the changes, guided by the spectral presence of the Temporal Ouija board. Services that once crashed silently were now reporting clear errors. Dependencies were no longer traps waiting to be sprung.
But just as they began to relax, strange things started happening. Workflows that had once been reliable began to misbehave. Data appeared to change on its own, and errors that made no sense emerged from nowhere.
“What’s happening?” Maya asked, her voice trembling.
On the screen, a single message blinked ominously: Non-Determinism Error.
The room grew colder.
Alex’s face turned pale. “This… this is what the legends warned about.”
Suddenly, the planchette on the Ouija board moved on its own again, sliding across the strange symbols with an urgent, frantic energy. The monitors flickered as if trying to speak, and then, a chilling message scrawled itself across the screens:
“You have disturbed the equilibrium. Workflows must be deterministic, or the system will descend into chaos.”
“But we didn’t know!” Sam cried out.
The Ouija board remained silent for a moment before a final word appeared, barely legible on the screen:
“Beware… the boogeyman of non-determinism. He has awoken.”
The lights flickered violently before plunging the room into darkness. The screens went black, and the hum of servers fell silent.
Somewhere in the darkness, the ghost of their system stirred, plotting.
If you would like to avoid the tragic fates of Sam, Alex, and Maya… make sure to check out Workflow Determinism for helpful determinism tips and tricks!