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← RoadmapDay 56 of 90Production2h 30m

Write a production readiness checklist

By the end of today you have a checklist you would genuinely use before putting something in front of users, and you can apply it to a service you did not write.

YesterdayDays 47 to 55 covered testing, logging, containers, pipelines, configuration, observability, performance and failure handling.

TomorrowTomorrow begins System Design, where these concerns are applied across many machines rather than one.

01

Why this matters

The difference between code that works and code that can be operated is a list of unglamorous things. Having that list written down is what stops you rediscovering each item during an incident.

  • Production readiness
  • Operational thinking
  • Tradeoff reasoning
  • Isolating a failure
02

Learn it

70 min

Copy this into Claude or ChatGPT. It quizzes you before it explains anything, which is deliberate. The resources under it are how you check what it told you.

Today's Master Prompt

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A prompt written for this day alone: your level, the exact scope, what to leave out, and an instruction to quiz you before it explains anything. Paste it into Claude or ChatGPT and it teaches you today's material.

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Check it against something that is not a model

An assistant can be fluent and wrong, and on a topic you met today you will not catch it. These cover the same ground and were made by people who do this for a living, so they are what you hold the explanation up against. They are other people's work and we only link to them, so judge them for yourself.

3 hand-picked resources

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Videos, official docs and articles covering the same ground, each opened and annotated by hand. They are what you check the assistant against on a day you cannot yet catch it being wrong.

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03

Build it

55 min

Write your production readiness checklist as a real file you will reuse, with every item phrased as a question that can be answered yes or no. Then apply it to your own API honestly and record which items currently fail. Fix the two cheapest failures today.

04

Recall it

25 min

Answer out loud, reveal, then mark honestly whether you had it. That score is the only thing on this page you do not get to choose.

5 recall questions

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Questions you answer from memory, then grade yourself against the real answer. The score is carried into the mastery rating below it, so an honest miss cannot quietly become a tick.

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05

Rate it

Completion and mastery are tracked separately. Be honest, because an inflated rating only means the concept resurfaces sooner.

Mastery tracking

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Rate yourself against five named criteria per concept. Completion and mastery are tracked separately, and anything you rate shakily comes back automatically on a spaced schedule.

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06

Recap

  • 01Operable means someone else can run, watch, diagnose and undo it
  • 02Every external call needs a timeout, a policy, and a plan for final failure
  • 03A migration is what makes a deploy irreversible
  • 04A checklist item you cannot justify is one you will ignore

Your progress

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Mark days complete, pick up where you left off across devices, and watch completion and mastery diverge. Free, and the account exists only so ninety days of work cannot vanish with a cleared browser.

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