Shipping Software Should Not Be Scary
7 Key Insight: Making deploys safe isn't about preventing all failures — it's about building resilient pipelines, embracing software ownership, and creating a culture where failures are small, frequent, non-events that everyone knows how to detect and recover from.
Charity Majors argues that shipping software should not be a scary, high-risk event, and that organizations must invest in making their deploy pipelines resilient to failure rather than trying to eliminate errors entirely. She advocates for software ownership where every engineer who writes code also deploys, monitors, and debugs it in production, creating shorter feedback loops and better software. The path forward involves treating deploy tooling as first-class infrastructure, embracing failure as normal, and incrementally gaining confidence in releases through canaries, feature flags, and observability.
8 Nothing is production except production. Don't rely on never failing; expect failure, embrace failure. Practice failure!
8 Never promote someone to 'senior engineer' if they can't deploy and debug their own code.
7 Software ownership is the natural end state of DevOps.
DevOps & SREObservability