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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

This article is inane to me. Someone decided to write a lengthy blog post on the deliberate and obvious misinterpretation of a meme.

DevOps and Observability are well described disciplines. I don't know anyone who has uttered the meme "I don't always test, but when I do, I test in production" who meant that monitoring, observing and reviewing prod behavior is bad. They invariably meant that they were rushed to release things in prod before it was adequately verified to ensure your customers don't have crappy experiences.

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Another read is that it’s just a hook to get into a meaningful subject - observability can be considered part of the test process. The inflammatory title gets clicks!

The author’s product is based on folks accepting this premise and seeking tools to do better.

I do think the setup to get to the substance is a bit long and indirect - but it’s not a given, especially at series B/C startups that folks think about production monitoring as part of the QA process so I do like to see more pieces on that.

The opinion of the article is that the catchphrase has become an excuse to build poor observability and in-prod testing tools, and we should be better about that.

The problem is that this article is misusing the catchphrase and now people are discussing the misuse of the meme instead of the article's content.

> The opinion of the article is that the catchphrase has become an excuse to build poor observability and in-prod testing tools, and we should be better about that.

Is that a problem that actually exists though? I've certainly never encountered it, as the types of teams the are strict about good pre-release testing are also the types of teams that are big on observability.

Haha that's why I said "opinion". If you're curious about my opinion. I think there are some good points, that observability tools could be better. I think "throw it over the fence to ops" is a slow-boiling problem coming down the pike. Are observability tool abjectly poor though? I don't think so.

I didn't get that. It seems to me the point was there's too many developers feel their responsibility ends when they hit deploy.

Couldn't agree more. Of course you use your product and do service quality measurements. What you don't do is toss "untested" code at your customers (possible exception here is hotfixes), which is what the meme means. Bad post written by someone either intentionally misinterpreting the meaning or dangerously unqualified to understand it.

> willfully misinterpreting

Often, when someone looks like they are “willfully misinterpreting” something, they are actually presenting uncomfortable implications or experiences of how a phrase is put into practice. Right or wrong, it is irritating to listen to.

Is it worth enduring your irritation in order to see if someone is meaningfully correct?

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> Don’t toss “untested” code.

“tested” is not a binary state. Code could always be better-tested —- otherwise why would you have hotfixes?

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