For me, "production" is the stable, tested version you ship that runs constantly. The one facing most users. You can have hobby projects with users, and 24x7

For me, "production" is the stable, tested version you ship that runs constantly. The one facing most users. You can have hobby projects with users, and 24x7 uptimes being a goal. It makes sense to distinguish "dev" from "prod" with those and to use mechanized testing and CI/CD, just as with commercial projects. A lot of open source projects fall into this category.