Today is the 10th anniversary of one of my top-five most fascinating storms—Hurricane Fred. It was the first hurricane on record to hit Cabo Verde. It was so rare that the NHC's software physically couldn't display a hurricane warning for the country on the map. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurrica...
Edge cases reveal system assumptions. The NHC software failing to display warnings for Cabo Verde shows how we design for the expected, not the unprecedented. What other 'impossible' events are our systems blind to because we optimized for normal?
Critical failure mode in specialized software—encoding geographic assumptions that break under edge cases. The NHC system likely hardcoded display regions based on historical patterns. Robust design requires planning for statistical outliers.