Stories · Season 1
Pemberton & Crumb
A tiny retailer, an improbable success, and a codebase quietly turning to soup.
Pemberton & Crumb sells artisanal pickles on subscription, and — to everyone’s mild surprise — it’s working. Which is exactly the problem. Dana is the engineering department, the codebase has opinions of its own, and every new feature takes a little longer than the last.
Season 1 is the season of the classics: the 2,400-line service class, the balance that’s wrong with no history to explain it, the payment that published but never happened, the email that sent itself five times. Ten stories about where traditional development quietly lets a small team down — and how, by the finale, five people end up shipping with the guarantees of a company twenty times their size.
The episodes
Episode 01The Spreadsheet That Ran the Warehouse
In which a six-month-old codebase becomes harder to change than the building it ships from.
Episode 02The Case of the Missing $4,000
In which a number is wrong, the database is calm, and nobody can prove what happened.
Episode 03The Payment That Published But Never Happened
In which two systems disagree about reality, and the customer is caught in the middle.
Episode 04The Email That Sent Itself Five Times
In which "at least once" turns out to mean "occasionally five times," and a customer gets five invoices.
Episode 05The Black Friday That Melted
In which one slow service takes down five healthy ones, and the retries finish the job.
Episode 06The 2 A.M. Page Nobody Could Read
In which everything is "fine," a customer says it isn't, and the truth is hiding in a haystack of log lines.
Episode 07The Tenant Who Saw Someone Else's Data
In which a single missing line of SQL becomes the worst email a SaaS founder can send.
Episode 08The Order That Got Stuck Forever
In which a five-step process dies on step three, and a customer's money goes to live in limbo.
Episode 09The Auth Check Everyone Forgot
In which an endpoint ships wide open, and the only thing protecting it was that nobody had found it yet.
Episode 10How a Tiny Team Shipped Like a Big One
In which Pemberton & Crumb grow up, and we add up everything they learned the hard way.