Why Code Breaks

Completely agree with this. I'm working on a startup with a somewhat legacy codebase where we're not following any of these practices, and it's completely a mess.

For example, the only way to know something happened is when the public website goes down, and when that happens I have to stop what I'm doing to SSH into the server, read journald logs to try to find out what happened, and tell that to the devs. Only recently I decided to just pipe them to a public log file and let other devs do their thing with that just so I can focus on my tasks.

Higher ups just won't let us invest time on setting up proper logging because "there are other priorities".

There's also a lot of dead code, files where some lines have 20+ trailing spaces, JWT sessions with our custom invalidation tracking, a hand-made XML parser (wtf)... It's honestly a complete mess, and I don't expect this startup to survive even a month when it's launched.

So much could have been better had they followed these practices from the beginning, instead of ignoring all 8 of them.

Water is wet.

In my experience tests are the primary mitigation for this issue.