Development vs production without the confusion

Early on I assumed 'production' just meant 'the server other people use'. It doesn't. Dev and prod are different environments with different tolerances, and blurring them causes the bugs that only show up after launch.

• Dev wants fast feedback; prod wants stability and observability.
• Dev can log everything; prod must be deliberate about what it stores.
• Dev runs on your machine; prod runs where you can't easily poke at it.

The fix was to make the boundary explicit: one config shape, switched by environment, never by editing code. If a difference can't be expressed as configuration, it's probably a bug wearing a costume.