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Build and change

Change it on purpose

The expensive failures are not bad code. They are changes made without a plan for what happens when the change goes wrong.

Choose a plan
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What is in this category

Procedures for the risky moments

Every one of them names the rollback before it names the change.

Implementation plan

A feature broken into steps a developer can execute and you can check off, with the decisions surfaced instead of buried.

Migration plan

Schema or data migration with the order, the reversibility of each step, and what to do when it stops halfway.

Server and deployment setup

What to provision, in what order, and which parts you must be able to rebuild from scratch.

CI/CD and rollback

A pipeline that can refuse a bad release, and a rollback procedure someone can actually follow at 2am.

Refactoring plan

Which part to change first, how to keep the system working throughout, and where to stop.

Integration plan

Payments, KYC, or any external service: the failure modes, the retry rules and what happens when the other side is down.

How a change procedure runs

  1. Discovery before design

    What is there now, and what depends on it. A plan written without this is a plan for a different system.

  2. The rollback is designed first

    If a step cannot be undone, that is written down as a decision you are making, not discovered afterwards.

  3. Steps that can be verified

    Each step says how you know it worked. “Deploy and see” is not a step.

  4. Verification after the fact

    A separate action checks the finished work against the plan, which is where most surprises are actually found.

When to plan rather than just start

Overkill if

The change is small and trivially reversible

It touches nothing that holds data or money

You are prototyping and expect to throw it away

Worth it if

It touches production data or payments

Undoing it later would be expensive or impossible

Someone else will implement what you decide

It is the kind of change that has burned you before

Pick the category that matches your worry

Describe the situation in your own words and see the procedure — and its cost — before you spend anything.

Choose a plan

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