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Comment by haolez | Hacker News Reader

As a solo founder, I have almost everything mentioned in this article set up, except CI/CD. I can certainly see its value, but being able to easily take down parts of my production system and replace them with instrumented variants is very useful to me when things go wrong. I find that CI usually gets in the way of this. Maybe it's just a bad habit that I need to ditch :)

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I think the first step is having CI but not reacting to it. For a while I shared your view, but after just "enabling it in the background" nowadays it's really useful. Even if it's just an "it compiles" check.

Depends on the kind of instrumentation you're talking about. I think metrics should always be collected, and I love having software where reasonable logs are on by default, and unreasonable levels of logging can be enabled/disabled at runtime without toggling.

Another big benefit to CI/CD is being able to work on multiple branches in parallel. That means, finishing one branch, sending that to CI/CD, then working on another, sending that to CI/CD, and so on.

> being able to easily take down parts of my production system and replace them with instrumented variants is very useful to me when things go wrong

Sorry what did you mean by this?

When some service is misbehaving, I have a script to take it down and replace it instantly by an instrumented version with more logs and whatnot.

Service reconfiguration is a thing and, in systems that handle dependency management well, tends to not be too painful. (I'm in the process of writing a TypeScript library for doing exactly this, designed for NestJS but usable outside of it.)

Got it. So it's like you're running the same service, but with a DEBUG flag on?

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