A Race Condition Caused Repeated Deploy Failures — A Retry Script Fixed It

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A developer repeatedly faced mysterious late-night deploy failures caused by a database migration script running before its Postgres container had finished initializing. The migration was racing the database's boot sequence, losing occasionally and triggering unnecessary rollbacks and alerts. The root issue was a flawed assumption that a dependency is immediately ready the moment it is requested. The developer built a reusable Bash retry function with exponential backoff and randomized jitter to handle such transient failures gracefully. The solution highlights that good retry logic must be bounded, selective, and staggered to avoid overwhelming recovering services.

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