17. Final Tips

Lead with evidence and constraints; design for operability, safety, and maintainability.

• Lead with the answer and trade-offs; state assumptions and SLOs.
• Put timeouts and deadlines on all external calls; make writes idempotent.
• Measure first: profile CPU, memory, mutex/blocking before optimizing.
• Design for operability: structured logs, RED metrics, traces, healthchecks.
• Prefer small interfaces and composition; avoid shared mutable state.
• Bound concurrency and implement backpressure to protect dependencies.
• Secure the supply chain: secret managers, pinned deps, govulncheck.
• Automate: CI with race detector, linters, fuzz tests for parsers.

Good luck — lead with evidence, pragmatism, and a clear articulation of trade-offs.