One of our #IndieWeb principles is Use What You Make^1.
We use the metaphor Eat What You Cook^2 to more broadly relate to creators^3 of all kinds, the chefs & cooks of the IndieWeb.

Cooks often taste their dishes while cooking, and modify them accordingly. Some even prepare entire dishes or meals to try themselves first, before preparing them for others.

On the IndieWeb, some of us do the same by first testing our own code changes in production^4 on our personal sites, before publishing them more widely. Sometimes we let our changes simmer on our own sites for a while, before serving our code for others to consume.

I myself have been most recently testing in production my at-mention auto-linking updates^5 on my site for over a week now. They seem to be working well, and I haven’t noticed any errors or regressions, so I’ll likely roll at least some of those changes into the CASSIS GitHub repo soon.

While testing in production may be a reasonable & good practice for personal sites, it’s often a bad idea for corporate or critical web sites or services, and there’s no shortage of such examples.

I have been wanting to write about our IndieWeb “test in production” practices for a while, and finally created a separate page on the IndieWeb wiki accordingly^4, organizing content from other pages, and adding examples beyond the IndieWeb as well.

Do you write code for your website that you test there in production before sharing it more broadly on GitHub etc.? Add yourself to the examples section^6

Thanks to Chris Aldrich (https://boffosocko.com/) for the eating what you cook banner image.

This is day 20 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days, written two days after. I have some double days ahead of me.

← Day 19: https://tantek.com/2023/020/t2/bridgy-fed-follow-form
→ 🔮


^1 https://indieweb.org/use_what_you_make
^2 https://indieweb.org/eat_what_you_cook, much more palatable than prior "selfdogfood" or "dogfood" metaphors from other open source related communities.
^3 https://indieweb.org/creator
^4 https://indieweb.org/test_in_production
^5 https://tantek.com/2023/011/t1/indieweb-evolving-at-mention
^6 https://indieweb.org/test_in_production#IndieWeb_Examples