What does "production-ready" actually mean?
June 19, 2026 1 min read
That it survives being used by people who did not build it: real permissions, real validation, backups that have been restored at least once, and money handled in decimals rather than floating point.
The checklist we hold ourselves to
Every financial column is a decimal, never a float — 0.1 + 0.2 is not 0.3 in floating point and an invoice total that is out by a hundredth is a support ticket you cannot explain.
Every action that must happen once happens once, even if the customer double-clicks or the gateway sends the callback twice. Every list a customer can see is filtered by ownership in the query, not in the template.
Backups run, and somebody has restored one. An untested backup is a belief, not a backup.
What a demo hides
A demo has one user, no history and no concurrency. Software falls over on the second user, the thousandth row and the first month boundary — none of which a demo contains.
This is why we ask to see your real data early, warts and duplicates included.
