The deploy you do not think about is the one that pages you
Every team I have joined had a deploy step someone described as "fine, mostly". It was never fine. A short field guide to the four questions that surface the rot before it surfaces itself.
π Lisbon, Portugal
I build the unglamorous machinery that lets small teams ship like large ones β the deploy pipeline nobody thinks about, the migration that runs at 3am without waking anyone, the log line that turns a two-day outage into a ten-minute fix. Most of my career has been spent on the wrong side of that trade: at big companies, with big platform teams, solving problems a team of six will never have. Now I work with the teams of six. The constraints are sharper and the work matters more. I write about the parts of engineering that don't make conference talks. Mostly in Go and TypeScript. Usually with a dog asleep under the desk.
Every team I have joined had a deploy step someone described as "fine, mostly". It was never fine. A short field guide to the four questions that surface the rot before it surfaces itself.
Not because it is bad β because it is a full-time job you have not hired for. What six engineers actually get from it, what it actually costs them, and the three cases where I still say yes.
Logs are read at 3am by someone who did not write the code and is afraid of making it worse. That is the reader. Almost nothing we log is written for them.