The only way that you can create stable and safe systems is by introducing processes to ensure that your systems are stable and safe. It doesn't matter how much

The only way that you can create stable and safe systems is by introducing processes to ensure that your systems are stable and safe. It doesn't matter how much personal responsibility you claim to take, you are going to make mistakes, and processes are the mechanism for limiting the damage of those mistakes. This is core to the best practices behind any safety critical industry, and is embedded in functional safety. The logic of this article appears to be "We just concentrate very hard to make up for not having a decent staging environment". Which is fine if no one cares if your stuff breaks. >When there is no buffer for changes before they go live, you need to be confident that your changes are fit for production. This is just completely wrong headed. It's like saying you should learn to tight rope walk 100 metres from the ground because it's going to make you concentrate on not falling more. The solution for making mistakes isn't to increase the fallout of those mistakes. You can absolutely build a culture where you value putting the onus on the developer to make sure they have a sense of responsibility for keeping master clean and working, without abandoning the processes that help mitigate when you fail to do that. The funny thing is, that when you see articles saying the opposite of this, almost always they will also say "over the course of X months, our new staging environment caught Y additional bugs that would have impacted production". I'd love to see the same here - some actual data on how much they "We're just going to concentrate harder" impacts production.