Eventual Consistency

or, the only system that's allowed to be slow

In ten-plus years of building software, I have never once heard anyone praise a system for being slow. “This database is wonderful, look how long it takes” is a sentence that does not exist. In my world we optimize for p99 latency: we obsess over the slowest one percent of requests, the stragglers, the tail. Slow is not a personality trait. Slow is a ticket, a page at 2am, a post-mortem with your name in it. Spend a decade there and it sets in your bones; you become a person who will not, under any circumstances, be the slow one.

And then you have a baby. And every authority you’ve learned to trust starts telling you to slow down.

The Montessori approach says it plainly: after a baby comes, slow everything down. It is what your body is asking for. It is how your child learns, not in a sprint but in long, unhurried, maddening repetition. Slow is the feature. Slow is the point.

So you stand there holding both truths, and you start to wonder: should I slow down? And underneath that, the scarier one. Can I?

Here is what nobody warns you about: long before you get to decide, the slowing has already happened to you, without your signature on it. Your career takes a backseat in the first trimester, when the smell of your own kitchen is a personal attack. It takes a backseat in the third, when you are gasping for air and getting up to pee every ninety minutes and still attending birth classes, breastfeeding classes, wrapping up work for a clean handover. Then you return, to a baby who wakes multiple times a night and must be rocked to sleep, because no one else on earth is authorized to do it.

And here is the part that undoes me: even when you don’t slow down, even when you grit your teeth and keep every commitment, you come back to find the projects shipped without you, the colleagues promoted ahead of you, and AI calmly writing the code you used to write by hand. You didn’t slow down. You just couldn’t keep up. The treadmill raised its speed while you were gone and forgot to tell you.

So I couldn’t help but wonder: if not slowing down already cost me this much, what would slowing down on purpose cost? Would I join some permanent underclass of the once-promising? Would the work simply route around me, the way a system routes around a slow node? Would I ever get to come back at all? And underneath all of it, the question I am almost afraid to type: is a career like this even worth defending, the kind with no slack in it and the layoffs always idling in the background, or is it just something I’ve been taught never to question?

But there is a term from my own world I keep forgetting to apply to my own life: eventual consistency. In distributed systems you give up on the fantasy that every copy of the data is identical at every instant. Too expensive, too brittle, impossible at scale. So you promise something gentler, and something braver: the system will converge. Not now, not synchronously, but it will get there, and getting there late is a guarantee, not a failure. The data isn’t lost. It’s in flight. I have spent ten years terrified of being the slow request, the one that gets flagged and optimized and killed, and it never once occurred to me that I might not be a bug at all. That a body recovering, a child learning in slow loops, a career on a long and deliberate pause might not be defects in a system that worships speed. They might just belong to a different system, running a different promise.

For about a day, that comforted me. Then I remembered the rest of the definition. The whole gentle promise rests on one assumption nobody says out loud, that the partition heals, that the disconnected node rejoins. Eventual is doing an enormous amount of quiet work in that word. It assumes someone is still trying to reach you. And nobody can tell me how long my partition lasts, or whether the system is still routing to me at all, or whether it converged just fine without me, promoted around me, and won’t much notice when I come back online. I want to believe I’m in flight and not dropped. Most nights I can’t tell the difference.

And then he wakes.

He looks at me and smiles and reaches and buries his face in my neck, and none of it is conditional on how I performed today. The industry can replace me in a heartbeat. To him I am the single most important person alive, and he did not have to read a promo packet to decide it. Who could raise him better than me? No one. Would raising him quench the other thirst, the one for hard problems with my name on them? No. Does he deserve the best of me, and do I deserve these hours with him that I keep apologizing to my calendar for? Yes, and yes, and the answers refuse to agree. For a few minutes the outside world goes quiet. I forget the tail, the partition, the colleagues pulling ahead. I just hold the warm weight of him, grateful for his hands, for a kind of happiness that comes with no strings and asks me to optimize nothing. It is the only contentment I have ever known that no promotion could give me and no layoff could take.

It doesn’t fix the fear. The two hungers don’t trade; feeding one has never once fed the other. So I hold both: the boy who is certain of me, and the career I am no longer certain of. And later, in my one quiet, unoptimized hour, still flinching at the word slow, still reading “p99” as a personal accusation, still terrified of opening LinkedIn and watching everyone else converge without me, I run the only query I care about, the one with no index and no answer:

Is anyone still waiting for this node to come back?