Nil pointer panics happen. When a DB column that was supposed to be non-null is null and the code unexpectedly accesses it. Oh schema won't help because legacy. There are rare though and we fix such issues as they are discovered, but just pointing out a benign case when crashing the whole server on panic may be a wrong approach. Our approach is to always recover from panics so the server keeps chugging, but raise an alarm so someone is paged and fixes the issue right away.
