Production Engineering Cheatsheet — The Stuff You Only Learn After Things Break

What you get

A compact production guide covering the fundamentals that keep systems reliable.

Inside

• ✅ Database queries: N+1, indexing, pooling, transactions
• ✅ Error handling: logs, retries, safe error responses
• ✅ Caching: invalidation, cache-aside, key design
• ✅ API design: rate limiting, pagination, versioning
• ✅ Security: SQLi, XSS, JWT, secrets
• ✅ Performance: async vs CPU work, background jobs
• ✅ Observability: logs, metrics, tracing
• ✅ Deployment: zero-downtime, migrations, feature flags
• ✅ Common pitfalls: timezones, money precision, race conditions

Who this is for

• Backend engineers shipping real services
• Developers moving from “it works” to “it survives production”

Format

• PDF
• Short, copy-paste friendly
• Updated for 2025