Bufo pulls the andon cord: a startup's selective embrace of DevOps principles
Hatchet, a startup running over 25 shards in 3 regions with tens of thousands of transactions per second, adopted the andon cord—a Toyota factory practice—to stop all work when a critical issue arises. They paused work for weeks to fix deployment, observability, and staging problems, which they say increased shipping velocity. The post details how this cultural norm, symbolized by a toad emoji, prioritizes reliability over new features.
The issue is that there is nothing more burdensome than unplanned work, and it's usually invisible to teams when it becomes normalized.