We're not the wild west we once were, but neither are we a paragon of testing. When I started Justin.tv, I had 1.5 years of software development experience, never on a team larger than 2 developers; I've now been at it for almost 7 years and yeah I don't think I'd do everything the same from the beginning.
Here are some things we now do at Justin.tv because of experiences like the one you mentioned:
- Everything gets code reviewed
- We have started to introduce tests (sorry Bill, they're really quite helpful in the right circumstance)
- We have extensive monitoring for all systems in case something DOES slip through
- We have fully automated deployment (and rollback)
There's a cost to all of these things, either in setup time or in constant maintenance. When you have few users, maybe they're not worth it - as you grow they become essential.