From Idea to Impact: Building Production Grade Software from Scratch

A while back, I built a software project and I was confident that it was ready for production. I couldn’t wait to launch it 🚀. It looked polished and worked flawlessly until it hit production. As soon as it went live, it broke… 💥. Bugs kept flooding in 🐛, ones I had never seen before, I kept on getting calls for reports and fixes. Late nights, patching things up while error logs kept overflowing 📄🔥. Learned from this experience the hard way: production ain’t just about code. It’s about resilience 🧱, planning 🗺 and reliability 🔁. In this post, I’ll be sharing everything I’ve learned through that experience earned the hard way 🏔️. Boy, I don’t want to go through that again 😵‍💫.

After that bumpy ride, I sat down and mapped out what it really takes to build production grade software, not just some code that works but code that survives the tough times 😎. In this post, I'll walk you through the essential steps that I now follow when building software seriously, and here is an overview of what you can find later in the upcoming steps:

Ideation & Discovery
Planning & System Design
Project setup and development workflow
Build, Test & Secure
DevOps, Deployment & Monitoring
Docs, DX & Scaling
Lessons & Best Practices Recap

1. Ideation & Discovery

This is the first phase of building any project where you identify the problem you are solving, the target audience, product vision, and goals etc. While working on this phase you should be curious. Ask yourself "why?" "how?" until you are satisfied.

Clearly define the pain point or need you are addressing. Ask yourself:

What are users actually struggling with?
Is this really a problem?
Do you think software can solve this problem?

Define the target audience:

Who are these people you are developing this software for?
What are their habits that you can tap into?

Market research and competitive analysis

Are there any competitors? What is it that they don't solve?
What's your USP?

These are some of the questions you should ask yourself before you build anything, and don't hesitate to ask more after all you are developing this masterpiece 🔥. Once you are done with all of this move on to the next step of development 🔑.

2. Planning & System Design

A very important phase of development is planning. You’ve now sorted out your questions. Now you have a vision and it's time to make something out of it. Let's start planning out a system.

So now what's the plan?

Now it's time to plan the process.

Plan the core features: An MVP (Minimum viable product) you could launch and build further on.
Set clear goals: Believe me mate, you don't wanna drift in a dev limbo.
Break your plan into simple milestones.

Architect like a boss 😎

Choose a suitable tech stack. Not the famous one but one that suits your project.
Sketch a rough system design diagram.
Think about APIs, databases, auth, failures (very important).

Ahh.. and don't forget the big picture. You need to make it scalable, reliable and maintainable and not over-engineer the product.

And that's how you clear the second phase. Here is your key🔑 to next phase along with all the diagrams🗺 and docs📝 related to APIs and other stuff.

3. Project setup and development workflow

Project scaffolding and folder structure Now you need to set up your project and plan a good folder structure. The folder structure you choose, regardless of the tech stack should be very easily understandable by anyone. Prepare a well defined, meaningful and modular folder structure. Remember you'll be reading this code 100+ times so keep it as simple and scalable as possible. A good structure would be one where any module can be ejected if needed.
Environment configs (dev, staging and prod) Whenever you build a good project it should have dev environment for developers, staging environment for testing and production for actual users. This separation of environments makes sure no issues go to real users and everything could be tested in production like environment without breaking stuffs.
Branching strategy and version control Do not forget about the engineer's best friend a version control and a branching system (GIT). Make a predefined structure for the branching (like feat/auth for feature and fix/auth for fixing) and commits. This makes sure that the whole system looks consistent and easy to understand and rollback.
Code quality, linting and tooling setup A very important rule to good practice is having a consistent coding styles. You should have formatters and linters setup for the project from the very start. This makes sure that while coding is done, it looks consistent, increasing readability for the code.

Always remember a good engineer is the one whose code can be read and understood not just by him, but by any engineer onboarding the project.

4. Build, Test & Secure

Now it's time to get down to business. We have everything set up and we're good to go. This phase is all about building and testing while maintaining security and consistency in the project.

Now you should start coding, building secure and stable features. Here, you should remember to make good use of version control systems like Git/GitHub, along with predefined code patterns. Your code should respect linter rules, be formatted correctly, and follow the predefined modular structure. Remember, you'll be spending half of your day with this codebase, so take care of your future self by keeping it neat.
While you code, also remember to add a testing layer side by side. Make sure to include unit testing and integration testing. You don't want to build a feature in the future that breaks your past 😬.
Build secure features. Make sure you build secure systems so that there’s no unauthorized access to users. You don’t want a customer coming in and destroying someone else’s data 😂. Security = VV Important.

5. DevOps, Deployment & Monitoring

What a good progress going on with the development till this stage. Clean code, consistent testing, stable system development.

But Wait what about testing in prod? I think we forgot we don't want it to blast on prod 😬. Now we'll be moving on to the DevOps, Development and monitoring.

You need to now deploy your project for production testing we call this staging environment.
Also you'd be wanting some pipeline to send your code from your machine to live app, and that too automatically. You'd want that it is tested before deployment. And most of all it's all automated.
TADA here comes the DevOps(Development + Operations). It is the automation of tasks like deployment and testing. This saves your 5-10 minutes of manual deployment and testing time for the staging and believe me it's best to have it when your app is pushing features quite often.

6. Docs, DX & Scaling

After you're done developing your feature, it's time to write some docs. Anyone who joins you in the development of the project should be able to understand it easily. And for you, it's a good practice to have a reference. Always maintain good documentation.
And a very important thing, you need a good developer experience while making an app.
Later down the line, whenever we want to run the development server or compile our project, we don't want to keep writing the same basic commands. Having scripts for such tasks is always the best approach. For example, in a web project, you might have a script like the following to run the development server:

npm run dev

DX (Developer Experience) is a crucial aspect where you maintain code consistency and simplify repeated processes for smoother development in the future and reduced code redundancy.
Remember, while you code, you're also preparing it for scaling ensuring good performance, caching, and load handling. It's essential that you write code with scalability in mind.

Lessons & Best Practices Recap

After going through all the stages of building production grade software. Here are some of the lessons I've learned:

Think Beyond code

Having "it works on my device" is not always a good reply. Need to have it production ready.
Stay ahead with a plan for what happens when your project is on prod. Monitoring, scaling and handling some weird edge cases.

Architecture is crucial

Good system design saves you from tech debt later.
Having modular testable code with clear boundaries is crucial.

Automate everything

You don't want to sit 5-10 minutes everytime there is a need to deploy some feature. Automation is a game-changer.
Also the more automation, the fewer the errors.

Security is not optional

Validate inputs, secure your secrets (even if you're in dev)
Treat development of any project as if someone will try to break it.

Monitor like a hawk

Log smartly, setup alerts and use dashboards
you won't be able to fix what you can not see

Dev experience is crucial

Good dev experience means feature development would be faster.
You don't want the future code reader to cry over the code 😬.

Feel free to add your thoughts or feedback. There's a feedback popup that opens when you click the button on the bottom right of the screen. It'll be public so everyone can see the post reviews.

And remember to implement these methods so that your next project users be like this👇