Engineering Practices¶

Tactical patterns and strategic principles for building reliable automation.

Overview¶

Engineering practices fall into two categories:

flowchart LR
    A[Engineering Practices] --> B[Patterns]
    A --> C[Principles]
    B --> D[How to implement]
    C --> E[When to apply]

    style A fill:#9e6ffe,color:#1b1d1e
    style B fill:#65d9ef,color:#1b1d1e
    style C fill:#fd971e,color:#1b1d1e
    style D fill:#a7e22e,color:#1b1d1e
    style E fill:#a7e22e,color:#1b1d1e

Patterns are concrete implementations. They answer "how do I make this idempotent?" with code.

Principles are decision frameworks. They answer "should I fail fast or degrade gracefully?" with trade-off analysis.

Patterns¶

Implementation techniques with code examples.

Pattern	Purpose	Key Technique
Idempotency	Safe retries	Check-before-act, upsert, force-overwrite
Caching	Avoid redundant work	Cache layers, invalidation strategies
Work Avoidance	Skip unnecessary ops	Change detection, conditional execution

View all patterns

Principles¶

Architectural guidance and decision frameworks.

Principle	Purpose	Trade-off
Graceful Degradation	Fail to safer states	Complexity vs resilience
Fail Fast	Detect problems early	Speed vs safety
Prerequisite Checks	Validate before executing	Latency vs correctness

View all principles

How They Work Together¶

Principles guide when to apply patterns:

Scenario	Principle	Pattern
Cache miss	Graceful degradation	Tiered fallback
Duplicate request	Fail fast	Idempotency key check
Missing permission	Prerequisite check	Early validation
Concurrent modification	Fail fast	Optimistic locking

Patterns are tools. Principles tell you which tool to pick.