Move Fast, Don't Break Things
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The Software Development Dilemma: Move Fast without Breaking Things?
One of the most famous Facebook slogans is Move Fast and Break Things. This is how Pedram Keyani [https://twitter.com/pedramkeyani] thinks back about what this meant at Facebook back in 2007 [https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/reflecting-on-3-years-at-facebook/415679363919] : >...
Coming back to Facebook - turns out they also had to go back on the whole "Break Things" part. In 2014 Mark Zuckeberg said their new motto is "Move Fast With Stable Infra":
What we realized over time is that it wasn't helping us to move faster because we had to slow down to fix these bugs and it wasn't improving our speed.
EDIT: Why is an inner quote I ADDED MANUALLY collapsed by default? WTF.
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Zuckerberg is an asshole
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@blakeyrat This is a very good article.
My takeaways:
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...move fast and break things is fine for many features. But the first step is identifying what you cannot break. These are things like billing code (...), upgrades (hardware or software upgrades can always be really dicey to perform), and data migrations.
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infrastructure debt - early on, as a startup, it's usually okay to have more of it. But once you have more users, if you don't want to upset them with bugs a lot of the time, then perhaps you should start to change your mentality to something similar.
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Whatever software you ship do make sure you can detect when your software breaks. Log errors on the server, send crash reports on apps, collect timeouts on web apps.
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The other, just as important thing few products do well is make it easy for users to report bugs.
I've struggled with all of these, with varying levels of success. A good list to keep in mind.
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