Aug 30 2024 Practices of Reliable Software Design

• Use Off-The-Shelf: Prioritize existing solutions like Redis unless the component is expensive or critical to your software's value.
• Cost And Reliability Over Features: Focus on creating a reliable and cost-effective solution with minimal features, as it's easier to add features to a reliable system than to make a feature-rich system reliable.
• Idea To Production Quickly: Deploy a minimal feature set to production to quickly identify necessary features and refine the solution based on real-world use.
• Simple Data Structures: Opt for simple data structures to avoid performance issues and bugs that can arise from complexity.
• Reserve Resources Early: Allocate necessary resources upfront to ensure the software can handle required loads and fail early if resources are inadequate.
• Set Maximums: Establish limits to avoid extreme cases that could degrade performance unpredictably, ensuring the software behaves consistently.
• Make Testing Easy: Implement easy testing methods, such as command-line inputs and assertions, to streamline the testing process and improve software reliability.
• Embed Performance Counters: Include performance counters to track how resources are used over time, helping to diagnose and optimize system performance.

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