To executives, new features mean more money, but even if you had terrific features, they wouldn't be worth a thing if they only worked half the time. Reliability isn't something you want to put off until later after the project has grown, it will save you a lot of time and money if you factor it in from day one. Everyone has adapted to a speedy internet these days. Users leave if the site is taking more than even a few seconds to load.
It's easy to get overly focused on features while losing the context of the overall application. The first and foremost solid you can do future you is to keep things as simple as possible. Never get overly complicated, that's where you run into scaling troubles. Complexity also causes significant headaches when bringing other people on.
In addition to keeping complexity low, make sure documentation gets written and that it's kept up to date. A solution that Molly's company has put in place to keep the docs fresh is to give every document an expiration date three months out from when it gets written. When someone references the docs, they check if it's past the expiration date, if it is they go through and make sure that the information is still current, and afterward extending the expiration date another three months.

Transcript
"Build Performant And Reliable Applications With Molly Struve" Transcript
Quotes

"To me, a site reliability engineer is a software engineer, but with their focus on performance and reliability."


"So, it's a dev, but they've got a little bit of something extra in there that just helps them kind of step back and look at the whole system and ensure that it's performing and reliable."


"There's only so much you can just attribute to the black box. Sometimes you actually got to go in there and figure out what's going on."


"You can have all the great features in the world, but if they're only working 50% of the time, none of your clients are going to be happy."


"A lot of times, if you're just focused on just the feature you're building, you'll lose the context of the overall application."

Resources

Making On-Call Not Suck
What It Means To Be A Site Reliability Engineer
Scaling Elasticsearch Part 1: How to Speed Up Indexing
Scaling Elasticsearch Part 2: How to Speed Up Search

Molly Struve

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Dev.to
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Joel Hooks

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