> What I learned from that is the fact that work never ever ends.
Exactly this. In general, it is totally fine to have short bursts of overtime but longer periods clearly point to management fail. Either chaos or greed rule in that company and the best thing to do is to get out ASAP.
The problem is even with using LWTs for both updates you are running into the same problem, the only thing you gain is that one of the statements (either lock or release) wins and in this case it then only works because the lock uses a TTL and is removed after some time.
Also, two conflicting statements from the same thread going to the same node should be easily serializable for Cassandra - or at least be logged.
> Don't take shortcuts and you won't get burned
Since you are the Datastax CTO, maybe some alignment with the marketing team on how features are communicated to users might help users not getting burned? :D
Had to get my personal X1 fixed while on a business trip in a company meeting room and another personal X1 in a hotel room while on vacation.