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

I'm surprised to see this because that's not the shipping speed that's visible externally. I do think a pre-PMF product team should consciously accrue tech debt, and just ship stuff they're confident in. But it's also good to shore up the load bearing code as you realize it's load bearing and pay down that debt.