What we check before putting any system live

Every system that leaves the development environment goes through the same scrutiny before touching production. It’s not a formality — it’s the difference between an incident and a quiet operation.

Sensitive data

We look for credentials, API keys, and passwords that may have been hardcoded into the code, and check that .env and equivalent files are kept out of version control. That includes reviewing the repository’s full history, not just its current state.

Attack surface

Every field that accepts user input is treated as hostile until proven otherwise — validated on the backend, never only on the frontend. We check for injection (SQL, HTML, email headers), misconfigured CORS, and any route exposing more than it should.

Infrastructure

Before deploy: rate limiting configured correctly (including behind a reverse proxy, where it’s easy to get the client’s real IP wrong), services registered to restart themselves on failure, and server configuration tested before it’s applied in production.

The result

None of these steps are visible to the end user. It’s invisible work — and that’s exactly why it matters: a system that doesn’t fail is a system nobody notices has engineering behind it. That’s the standard we apply to every project we put our name on.