Most complex software ships with a few bugs. Obviously, we want to avoid them, but the more complex a feature is, the harder it is to cover all the use-cases. As we get closer to our RC date, do we feel confident that what we're shipping has as few blocking bugs as possible? I would like to say we're close, but the truth is I have no idea. It feels like we'll have to keep trying the features for a bit until we don't run into anything - but we have less than 3 weeks before the RC ships. Here's a few surprising bugs that need to get fixed before I would feel comfortable shipping node12 in stable.

In the interest of reducing warranty claims (which are much more expensive than that incremental manufacturing cost) carmakers are sizing the whole unit to reliably accommodate the worst case draw (driver turns everything on at the same time, at idle).

In object-oriented programming, information hiding (by way of nesting of types) reduces software development risk by shifting the code's dependency on an uncertain implementation (design decision) onto a well-defined interface. Clients of the interface perform operations purely through it so if the implementation changes, the clients do not have to change.

We check in our code at the entry point of a pipeline, version control (Git and Github in our case), and then it’s taken through a series of steps aimed at assuring quality and lowering risk of releases. Automation helps us keep these steps out of our way while maintaining control through fast feedback loops (context-switching is our enemy). If any step of the pipeline breaks (or fails) we want to be alerted in our communication channel of choice (in our case Slack), and it needs to happen as quickly as possible while we’re in the right context.