Field Notes - Dec 22, '25

Executive Signals

• Freeze is insurance: early tests, peak blackout, owner-led restart
• Adapters follow clarity: manual path until partner spec stability
• Parity over bring-up: stage equals prod or bugs graduate
• Kill switches are culture: frozen triggers beat midnight incident bridges
• Allowlists beat auto-enroll: constrained exposure shrinks partner blast radius

CEO

Holiday Freeze Protocol: Test-Off-On

If you must touch production near a holiday or blackout, keep human risk to near-zero. Prove the change in lower environments with real schedulers and queues, go dark over the peak, and only resume when named owners are online. Clear regulatory and financial batches with days of buffer, not hours.

• Define blackout windows and owners; verify a global kill switch for cron/triggers
• Run a subset in stage for 1–2 days with real queues/schedulers
• Resume on the first business day; target ≥72h before any compliance batch

Engineering

Defer Adapters Until the Spec Settles

Partners requesting “some, not all” flows create brittle selection logic. Keep the manual path until the inclusion criteria are written, sampled, and stable. Then build one adapter you can defend, and gate exposure.

• Set a decision cutoff per partner (e.g., T-72h); default to skip if unclear
• Require written criteria and a sample list before engineering starts
• Ship behind a feature flag and allowlist; no silent auto-enroll

Stage Bring-Up Checklist Beats Firefighting

Spinning up stage is easy; achieving prod parity is not. Treat the first failures you hit—secrets, storage paths, Redis, schedulers, artifacts—as a predictor of prod. Fix them once, as a checklist and as code with alarms.

• Enforce secrets parity via central KMS; verify rotation and access scopes
• Mirror storage paths and names; smoke test Redis, schedulers, and queues
• Validate artifact pipelines end-to-end; alert on missing or failed writes