Ask HN: When is your side project 'production-ready'? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When is your side project 'production-ready'?

3 pointspaulbjensen8 comments

I had a call with someone who wants to use a tool I built in their profession (medical). They asked me if the application was production-ready. I was confident in saying yes (the app has been running in production for months, and has tests at unit, functional, and integration levels), but I pondered if I could call it production-ready based on that.

How would you deem your side project as production-ready, especially when used in a mission-critical environment?

PS - The project in question is Dashku: https://github.com/Anephenix/dashku (also hosted at https://dashku.com)

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You should make it very clear to the person asking that while you've been using it in non-mission-critical production scenarios for some time, it is still an incomplete and actively developed project with changes and fix bugs on a regular basis and that you provide no warranty or guarantee of fitness for any particular purpose (this is in the MIT license that you're using, but you don't want to promise anything beyond what's in the license which is "we promise nothing.").

Basically, Dashku is "incorporate at your own risk" software, with the additional note that the hosted version is absolutely not for mission-critical use, that it may become unavailable at any time for any reason and for any duration.

Basically, you want to be sure you're shielded from someone in a "sue everyone!" mindset coming after you just because you wrote a piece of software that was later incorporated into someone else's package where you have no control over how they use it, whether they apply bug fixes, whether they make changes, etc.

There's a reason that an awful lot of commercial software EULAs out there include language specifically referring to the software not being suitable for mission-critical, failure-critical, medical, etc. purposes.

Thanks for your advice. I didn't realise that commercial software EULA's had clauses for things like that. I guess it means that there is a market for, or should be commercial support for the app.

Have you had a lot of people that aren't you try to break the living hell out of it? Especially those not familiar with the usual workflow? Especially those that take pride in destroying things?

If it can pass that, and you're confident going forward from there, then I would think it's ready.

In terms of traffic, lots of individuals have tried it, but in terms of trying to make it break, no. That is a great idea, thanks for the suggestion.

No problem. A couple buddies and I take turns trying to wreak havoc on each other's software when it comes time to ship. It's quite fun and very good for ensuring interface and codebase stability.

You might want to fix the readme link to the MIT license, as it's broken. Why not paste in the full text? They have that warning about no liability and no warranty which might be really important for you.

Just fyi that the screenshot on the github page has the word 'nigga' on there from someones comment.

Ah, Thanks for pointing that out. I'll scrub the word out from the screenshot.

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