my biggest unexpected engineering lesson from my short adventure at merkle:

if you're cracked you have enough confidence to ship code to high-traffic prod without testing it first

stuff that i would estimate in my head for 2 days @gt can do in 2 hours because he just looks at the code, knows what to change and ships it -- while i need to find a way to run in a replicable environment, test, give others and only then im comfortable with shipping

bell curve: test in prod -- automated tests / staging / replicated envs -- test in prod

Maybe you went too far the other way but nothing wrong with a replicable environment and testing there IMO.

And what's two days anyway?

Testing in production environment depends. For a social media app with not many users, sure.

It's all fun and games until it blows up in your face and you're down for several days.