For years I thought sudo just had to take seconds to startup. Then one day I stumbled across the fact that this is caused by a missing entry in /etc/hosts. I still don't understand why this is necessary.

https://serverfault.com/a/41820

Number one rule of distributed systems, "the network is not reliable"

Also the number one rule of Comcast.

I have actually used this to test remote pair-programming tools, as remote pairing really hinges on latency.

If we have a pesky test suite with failing latency tests https://github.com/auchenberg/volkswagen

Second rule, trust no one.

I'd add SaaS dependencies as well, whether it be slowness or downtime

This is a solved problem tho, timeout / retry / circuit breakers / fallback etc.

See - https://github.com/resilience4j/resilience4j

I wouldn't call it solved if a downstream SaaS is down and my build still times out despite the aforementioned resiliency.