Calling exec() to run a shell command works in demos and fails silently in production. Here is how to spawn processes correctly, handle every exit code, prevent orphans, and build a supervisor that restarts crashed workers without losing state.
Most teams have unstated review standards that two senior engineers disagree about. The result: long inconsistent reviews, slow PRs, and frustrated authors. A short, written, agreed-upon checklist solves it. Here is one that works, and the meta-rule that keeps it from becoming another bureaucratic process.
Most teams ship features as “merge to main and deploy.” The result is that a bug affects 100% of users immediately. Five-stage rollouts (internal, 1%, 10%, 50%, 100%) turn “oh no” into “catch it at 1%.” Here is the working pattern, the metrics that gate each stage, and the rollback procedure.
Most postmortems are theatre: a Google Doc with a timeline and three action items that nobody owns. The version that actually prevents the next incident has six properties: it's blameless, focuses on the system, has owned action items, and gets shared widely. Here is the template and the rules.
Most teams adopt SLOs by copying Google's book and end up with 30 dashboards nobody reads. The version that earns its keep is two SLIs per service, an error budget that drives real decisions, and a quarterly review. Here is the working setup and the rule that keeps SLOs from becoming bureaucracy.
SemVer is simple on paper and dishonest in practice. Most maintainers ship breaking changes in patches and call it "a bug fix." Here is what each version part actually means, the four kinds of changes that look like patches but aren't, and the deprecation playbook that lets you evolve a public API without breaking the world.
The rebase-vs-merge debate is a proxy for a more useful question: what should the history of `main` look like a year from now? Here is the policy that answers it, applied to feature branches, long-lived branches, and the cases where you really should preserve the merge.
Most teams have one feature-flag system and four kinds of flags pretending to live in it. Release toggles, ops toggles, permission toggles, and experiments behave differently, decay differently, and need different cleanup rules. Here is the taxonomy that prevents flag debt from eating your codebase.