Juuri: you can already build, now understand what you built

Companies pay people to be woken up, in a rota, so that no individual carries every hour. You have the same responsibility and a rota of one. Whatever you decide about answering, you are deciding it for every hour of every week, including the ones you intend to spend asleep.

Worth getting up for

Money is moving incorrectly, or not at all
Data is being lost or exposed
Nobody can log in
It is getting worse on its own

Genuinely fine until morning

One user hit one strange edge case
A page is slow but working
Something looks wrong but nothing is wrong
You have already stopped the bleeding

Then there is the data. A backup you have never restored is not a backup, it is a belief. Restore one into a scratch environment on a calm afternoon, once. You will find out whether it works, and you will learn how long it takes, which is precisely the number you will want to quote to somebody while it matters.

Real users also bring obligations that have nothing to do with code. Somebody will ask you to delete their account and everything attached to it. If the honest answer is that you do not know everywhere their data went, that is worth fixing now, while there are eleven users and three tables, rather than later, under a deadline, with a lawyer reading over your shoulder.

If this broke at 2am on a Sunday, what have I already decided to do about it?

"Nothing until Monday" is a perfectly respectable answer when it is chosen in advance and published. It is a much worse one when it is discovered in the moment by a user who expected otherwise.

Show field notes toggles a search param the loader reads. With it off, the slow promise is never created, so nothing streams.

You are the on-call rota

What to remember