Fail fast, fail cheap, fail well: learn faster
Program defensively, strictly and rigorously. Return exceptions whenever the conditions are not adequate at a specific moment of execution.
One of the practices that will help you and that I assume you already know, are guard clauses. Forget about else in conditionals (they will make your code simpler and more readable).
The more permissive you are in your developments, the greater the corrective actions you will have to take later and the more difficult it will be to detect the root cause of the bugs and inconsistencies that it generates.
Make sure you have a good error control strategy: show the user friendly errors and record all the technical information possible to reach them as quickly as possible and understand how you are interacting with the system, acting accordingly to avoid or reduce them.
Lean Startup Model
If you haven’t read the book, I’ll summarize it here.
Learn quickly from your mistakes. Through a small and cheap MVP, measure the results and confirm the hypotheses of your initial idea through experimentation such as A/B Testing. Pivot or persevere in each case. Extrapolate it to all areas. In the technical field, avoid BDUF or BMUF and overengineering.
Fail fast, fail well
Failure is inevitable and is part of the process of improvement, learning and evolution in a given context. We are human, blaming ourselves for failures would be blaming ourselves for being what we are.
So make sure that, in the event of a failure, the capacity for reaction and learning is as fast as the context allows (extrapolate it also in any field). For example, in the one that concerns us: if you find an important failure in the publication of a new version to production: you should have a rollback strategy and use practices such as canary releasing for a low impact in case of error. Record all possible information for subsequent analysis and learning from everything that happened.
Kent Beck in his book Extreme Programming Explained explains the importance of courage as one of the values of a team. Faced with fear: courage!
#tryagain