Signs it is time to revisit environment configuration

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A few signals that environment configuration is due some attention.

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Secrets belong in the environment, never in the repository
• Development and production should differ only in configuration

How we handle it

Document every variable a new developer needs. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

In practice

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Three things worth confirming about environment configuration before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Document every variable a new developer needs — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.