Last April, I wrote a well-received article about the 13 software engineering laws - Hyrum’s, Conway’s, Zawinski’s, and 10 famous others.

Leading Developers

Seven hard-learned unwritten rules of software engineering drawn from real incidents: always roll back before debugging when production breaks after a deploy; test your backup restores, not just their existence; logging is always imperfect but aim for balance; every DB change needs a tested rollback plan; external dependencies will fail so plan for it; use the four-eyes rule for any risky operation; and temporary fixes become permanent, so make them at least non-hacky.

The unwritten laws of software engineering

1. It’s always related - first roll back, then debug

2. Backups aren’t real until you’ve restored from them

3. You’ll always hate yourself for how you write logs

6. If there is ANY risk - “4 eyes” rule

7. There is nothing more lasting than a temporary fix

<p>This was a fun read. That’s it. Nothing else to contribute, lol</p>


<p>The most fun part about temporary fixes is that they are usually absolute garbage and will annoy you for the entire time you work at the company and then some day the entire software will be built on that temporary fix and there is no way to remove it ever.</p>
