Look at where your care goes.
The pull request the lead will read
gets a clean history,
good names,
tests for the edge cases.
The slides for the demo
get rehearsed twice.
Then there is the script
you wrote on a Wednesday
to fix twenty six thousand records
in production.
No review,
because it only runs once.
No tests,
because it only runs once.
A where clause
copied from your own notes.
It ran against the live database
with your credentials,
and nobody will ever read it.
That script was the most dangerous thing
you wrote all month.
The same goes for
the nightly job that tidies old files,
the export finance opens every Monday,
the one line change
made straight on the server
because it was quicker than a release.
They are invisible,
and they carry the real consequences.
Nobody decides to work this way.
Care follows the audience,
because the audience is
where the praise comes from,
and the embarrassment too.
A reviewer can see a messy function.
Nobody sees a one-off script
until the morning it removed
the wrong four thousand rows.
But risk does not care
who is watching.
It follows what the code touches.
Money.
Customer data.
Anything that cannot be put back.
So set your standard
by what the work can break,
not by who will see it.
Before you start,
ask one question.
If this goes wrong,
what does it take with it?
If the answer is real data,
real money
or real people,
it gets the full treatment,
whether it is a feature
or a script you will delete by Friday.
A second pair of eyes,
even for ten minutes.
A dry run that only counts
what it would change.
A backup taken first.
A test against a copy.
And if the answer is nothing,
be quick,
even on the work
everyone will admire.
Most of us
have the order backwards.
We polish what gets looked at
and rush what gets trusted.
The people who depend on your work
will mostly never see it.
Do it properly for them.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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