Building Systems That Last

In the modern day rush to ship a new feature or meet a deadline... We frequently cut corners, forget intricate details, and make mistakes.

Yet, how often do we as developers approach code with the same rigor as a civil engineer designing a bridge? How often do we think about either ourselves or the next developer who will be maintaining our code five years from now?

Reliability Isn't Optional

I've seen systems fail horrifically in ways we couldn't expect because someone took a shortcut. I've debugged outages at midnight caused by code that "worked perfectly fine in testing." I've contributed to codebases so fragile that adding a single feature felt like performing surgery with a sledgehammer.

"The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten."
— Benjamin Franklin

But this doesn't have to be a standard. Reliable systems aren't a chore or accident. Reliability comes from intentionality. Consider the long term while working in the present. Think about your future while living now.

The Principles of Lasting Systems

1. Predictable Behavior

Your system should behave the same way every time. Period. The words "Oh, I didn't think of that." should never come out of your mouth. You shouldn't be afraid to break something. In fact, you should be actively trying to break your product and system at every available moment.

The end user is both the smartest and stupidest person on the planet. They find the most unique methods of breaking things while also missing what's painfully obvious.
— Me

2. Graceful Degradation

When things go wrong (and you are a fool if you think they won't), your system should fail gracefully. A network timeout shouldn't crash your entire application. A missing image shouldn't break your layout. Forgetting to sanitize user input shouldn't cause a data breach. Plan for failure, because failure is not an exception. Tt's a feature of distributed systems.

3. Observable and Debuggable

You can't fix what you can't see. Logging, monitoring, and debugging into your system from day one. Future you (and your co-workers) will thank you when you're troubleshooting an issue at 2 AM.

Start Today

To build reliable systems you don't need to go rewrite your entire codebase. Start small:

Map out what each route and function does. Figure out what it wants and what happens if it doesn't get what it wants.
Document your code. Writing out what it should do will help you visually see if it's functionality matches it's intent.
Graceful error handling. Always account for the worst case scenario and alwyas expect it to break.
Write code with reliability in mind, not just functionality

Every small improvement compounds. Every edge case handled and error logged makes your system a little more reliable. Reliability, once established, becomes a habit.

Future is relative, it could be 500ms to 500 years from now. Think about the future.
— Me