Developers should care and feed for their systems, especially when they’re in production. Alerting, logging, and metrics are the tools you need. Further, you need to use actual production errors as a feedback loop to push you to write more fault tolerant code.

I’ve struggled with that part in the past. It’s tempting to think I can just code along, building beautiful code. Beautiful code is entirely different from production code. Handling errors, timeouts, partial failures, logging, instrumentation: it’s not exactly design pattern stuff. To wit:

Fault-tolerant code is ugly. It requires conditionals. It won’t look like code in programming books, screencasts, or blog entries. This is the way it has to be, I’m sorry.
Production is all that matters. Highly intelligent words from Dave Copeland. The beauty of code, as it appears in my text editor, is not as important as how it works when it runs on servers. New mantra!