What scares engineers the most? Not spiders. Not clowns. Production incidents.

A single misstep can take down critical systems, impact customers, and put your name on a P0 incident. While outages are often seen as inevitable, many of them are preventable with the right mindset and practices.

In this talk, I’ll share the “10 Commandments of Working in Production” — a practical, experience-based framework for reducing risk, improving reliability, and building confidence when operating live systems.

Through real-world examples (including painful mistakes), we’ll explore how small decisions in day-to-day work can have massive production impact, and how to avoid them.

Key Takeaways:

How to approach production with a safety-first mindset
Why rollback plans are non-negotiable (and how to build them)
The hidden risks of “harmless” changes
Best practices for deployments across environments (Dev → Staging → Prod)
Why timing, collaboration, and version control matter more than you think
The dangers of manual changes, root access, and unchecked AI-generated code
How to turn production incidents into long-term engineering growth

Audience:
DevOps Engineers
Backend Developers
SREs
Engineers working with cloud and production systems (any level, especially mid to senior)

Session Level:
Intermediate

Why This Talk:

Many engineers learn production the hard way — by breaking it.

This talk compresses years of real-world experience into actionable principles that can help engineers avoid common pitfalls, reduce outages, and operate with more confidence in high-stakes environments.