Articles by Kesha Mykhailov
Shipping fast and safe: Building a culture of low-risk learningIntercom believes in shipping code as quickly as possible to learn from production and iterate faster. Here are some of the strategies and tactics they use: • They foster a culture of iterative delivery and invest in their delivery pipeline to make deployments easy and quick. • While shipping fast is important, they also minimize risk by building resilience through observability, fast recovery, and reducing the blast radius of issues. • Engineers are available after shipping risky changes to monitor for issues and spot problems early. • They ship instrumentation first to understand code paths and scale before making changes. • They use feature flags to enable disabling changes quickly and safely. • They initially ship changes to a small subset of traffic to reveal edge cases while minimizing impact. • They ship changes to the read path first before the write path for easier rollback. • They document and share rollout and rollback plans to build learning material. • They constantly improve their processes to enable engineers to provide value while learning from production.