About

Who made it

I'm Ryan French, a software engineering leader with more than 15 years of building and leading teams. Most recently I was Senior Director of Software Engineering at EdgeCast, where I led an organization of 30+ engineers responsible for the software running on 30,000+ servers across 135 data centers (PoPs), while the network grew from about 40 to more than 125 Tbps.

My focus is building and scaling high-performing teams: high trust, clear ownership, and engineers who understand how their code behaves in production and own it there. I still build things, too. I designed and built Prodfail myself, with AI coding tools as an everyday part of the work.

Why I built it

I've spent my career responsible for code and the teams that write it, and the incidents that hurt the most were rarely exotic. They were ordinary code that worked fine one request at a time: two requests racing for the same row, a retry that turned a blip into an outage, a cache that never let go. Most engineers learn those lessons from a postmortem. Prodfail is a place to learn them before the pager does.

How it works

Your code runs in real Node.js inside the browser tab, so there is no server and nothing to install. Levels are written in TypeScript, and the JavaScript version is generated from the same source. There are no accounts and no cookies: your progress stays in this browser.