Ten things that decide whether your app survives.
Run this against what you have today. Every item is something you can check yourself, in an afternoon, without hiring anyone. If most of them come back clean, you don't need us.
Count the ones you can answer with evidence rather than intent. Configured is not the same as tested. Intended is not the same as written down.
- 01
Restores
Not backups you have configured. Backups you have restored.
We restore your database from backup into a clean environment while you watch, and time it, so you know your real recovery window.
- 02
Failover
What happens when a dependency dies is decided in advance and written down, not discovered at 3am by whoever answered the page.
We turn things off on purpose and show you the system surviving it.
- 03
Observability
You can answer "what's broken, and since when" in minutes. Not 200 dashboards nobody opens and alerts everyone muted in week two.
A handful of alerts that mean something, each with a written response.
- 04
CI/CD
Every change is tested and shipped the same way, every time. Nobody deploys from their laptop. Nobody is the only person who can release.
A new engineer can ship to production safely without a senior watching.
- 05
Deployment & rollback
Shipping is boring and reversible. Undoing a bad release is a routine act, not an incident.
Rolling back is quick, and someone on your team has actually done it.
- 06
Integration testing
Tests that exercise the paths that matter — auth, payments, the thing that makes money. Not 400 unit tests mocking each other into a green checkmark.
Tests fail when the product is broken, and don't fail when it isn't.
- 07
Security
The boring parts that actually get people: secrets out of the repo, dependencies patched, auth you didn't invent yourself, least privilege, an audit trail. Not compliance theater.
No credential in git history, and a named owner for every access path.
- 08
Scaling
Headroom for the load you'll plausibly have, and a known lever to pull for more. Not a web-scale architecture for traffic you're fantasizing about.
We tell you the number where it breaks, and what to do when you get there.
- 09
Clean code
Clean is meaningless unless it's defined, so: code a mid-level engineer can pick up without a guide. Boring names, obvious control flow, no cleverness that needs its author present to explain.
The handoff below. That test is the definition.
- 10
Performance
Fast enough that it isn't the problem, measured rather than guessed, with a known answer for where the next bottleneck is.
We hand you the measured numbers and name the next bottleneck, so you can tell whether performance is actually your problem.
Performance is last on purpose. It's the item we care about least of the ten. Nobody died from 15% latency — they died because the restore had never been tested and the person who knew why was at Google.
How did it go?
Nobody clears all ten. The question is whether the gaps are the ones that end companies — restores, failover, and whether anyone but the author can read the system. If that's where yours are, that's the conversation we have.