Then she gets up and leaves. The patient is still on dialysis, still bleeding in places, and their internal organs are still on show for everyone else in the room. The patient’s immediate future is secure, but eventually they are still going to bleed to death.

As a DevOps engineer, perhaps one of the best things you can do for an engineering team is to empower them to write and utilize tests. This may be as simple as setting them up with a hosted CircleCI account, or might be as involved as setting up an entire build pipeline on an internal CI system like TeamCity, AWS Codebuild or Jenkins.

Until you have found product-market fit, your production environment is often just another test environment. It’s not testing your code, it’s testing your customers.

At a previous startup company, we had a few hundred thousand users. Not all that many, but enough to get some interesting data and be in a position to use it to optimize the business. We had previously built a recommendation engine in Elasticsearch which all our users were piped through, and we user it to provide daily recommendations based on our most recent data. It wasn’t all that complex at first, and served us really well for a while.