Your app doesn't crash because of bad code. It crashes because of the decisions you never made.
Where does your data actually live? What happens to your bill when you go from 10 users to 10,000? Who's responsible when something breaks at midnight? Most builders find out the hard way — you don't have to. Here's the 7-question checklist to run before you write your first line of code.
Before you write a single line of code, you make choices you'll be living with for years. Here's how to make them on purpose instead of by accident — explained with a real app.
Imagine two friends, Alex and Sam, decide to build a note-taking app together — think a simple version of Notion. They're excited. They open their laptops and start coding the login page that same night.
Six months later, Alex is up at 2 AM because the database is down and nobody knows how to restore it. Sam just found out a client in Germany can't legally use the app because user data is stored in a country with no privacy agreement. Neither of these problems was a coding bug. They were architecture problems — decisions that should've been made before the first line of code, not discovered in a panic afterward.
