(01)
From dev to prod in 15 minutes — small-team release engineering
Many small teams take hours to ship a single PR — manual checks, slow CI, fragile deploys, on-call coordination. Getting commit-to-prod under 15 minutes is achievable with focused decisions on each pipeline stage.
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(02)
CI/CD on GitHub Actions for boutique studios — under 50 lines
Most boutique studio CI/CD is overengineered: hundreds of YAML lines, complex caching, custom runners, monthly debugging of pipeline issues. A simpler setup under 50 lines handles 90% of needs reliably.
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(03)
Secrets management without a vault platform
HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Doppler — paid vault platforms are great, and overkill for small teams. Smaller teams can handle secrets cleanly with simpler tooling that fits within their cloud provider and developer workflow.
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(04)
Database backups that actually restore — testing 3-2-1 in practice
Most database backups exist but have never been tested. A scary fraction won't actually restore when the database burns down. The 3-2-1 strategy plus quarterly restore drills is the minimum for any production database.
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(05)
The case against monorepos for small teams
Turborepo and Nx made monorepos easy. That doesn't mean small teams should adopt one. Polyrepo is fine for 2-5 devs.
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