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Concepts You Only Learn After Running Code in Production
The Unwritten Rules of Production-Grade Software
Writing correct code is only step one.
Keeping it alive, fast, and resilient in production is a different game.
These lessons aren’t just theory -they’re the hard truths that every backend developer learns after their first real outage, rollback, or midnight PagerDuty call.
Read them before production teaches them to you the hard way.
1. Production readiness involves more than code correctness
Just because your code compiles and passes tests doesn’t mean it’s ready for production. True readiness requires operational support: monitoring, alerting, scaling, security, and performance.
Example:
You deploy a new service to prod. The logic works, but there’s no alerting on CPU/memory spikes. It goes down at midnight, and no one knows until users start complaining next morning.
Checklist to consider:
- Is there an SLA/SLO defined?
- Are alerts configured for error rates, latency, memory, CPU?
- Is there a fallback or graceful degradation?
