Pilots run a checklist before every takeoff. Surgeons run one before every incision. Not because they forgot how to fly or operate — because the cost of skipping a single step under pressure is too high to trust to memory. Shipping a Solana program to mainnet-beta belongs in that same category: irreversible actions, real value on the line, and a dozen small things that each seem obvious right up until the moment you forget one.
I spent the last several days building every piece of a real launch — promoting a program from devnet to mainnet-beta, taking deliberate control of its upgrade authority, publishing an IDL and generating a typed client, wiring a React frontend through the Wallet Standard, and teaching that frontend to fail politely instead of loudly. All of that knowledge is fresh in my head right now, which is exactly the problem: in three weeks, when I'm about to ship the next program, it won't be. "I'll remember" is not a launch strategy.
So here's the checklist, written in the order the steps actually happen, with the gotchas I personally hit called out along the way.
Phase 1: Pre-flight, on devnet
These are the steps that catch problems while they're still cheap to fix.
