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5 things I wish somebody told me when I started writing production code

#softwareengineering#programming#codingtips#bestpractices#codequality

John Pratt
John Pratt
June 7, 20251 min read
  1. Ship broken code, but hide it behind a feature flag. It's how you move fast without breaking things.

  2. Logs aren't optional. Without them you're flying blind.

  3. In production, every external API will flake on you. Wrap it in a timeout, a rescue, and a log.

  4. Don't hard code things that will change like URL's or limits. Put it in an environment variable.

  5. Figure out how to tell your code is working in production before you launch. Set up alerts, logs and dashboards.

Save this for later and send it to the new dev on your team.

John Pratt

John Pratt

Founder, Pratt Solutions · Previously at Northern Trust, Duke Energy, Capital One

Built enterprise systems at Northern Trust, Duke Energy, and Capital One. Now freelancing and building tools that solve hard problems at scale.

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