Bro, Your App Is on Fire
About the book

Think of this as your SaaS/App/Startup firefighter’s field guide.

Each chapter starts with a real “fire scene,” a story from the trenches, then we go through the “fire drill,” how tofix the issue, what to automate, and what to never do again. Finally, we talk “fireproofing,” the systems and principles that keep you sane when you scale.

This book is not a “10x founder mindset" or “disrupt or die.” What it is - is a grounded playbook for surviving the messy middle, the part between your first deploy and your first real success.  This book isn’t about theory - If you don’t understand a term or a concept I talk about, Google it, or ask me. It’s about experience, the kind that smells like burnt servers and bad sleep. It’s what happens when “move fast and break things” meets “pleases top breaking things.”

You will still burn stuff. Let’s be honest, there’s no such thing as fireproof engineering.You’ll still deploy bugs. You’ll still lose a weekend to a stupid config typo.You’ll still think you’ve solved caching until you learn the hard way that caching is a religion with no god. But that’s okay. Because each fire you survive teaches you how to build systems that break better. Resilience isn’t about preventing failure; it’s about recovering faster than your competitors. You learn to anticipate entropy, you learn to automate recovery, you learn to stop panicking when you see smoke, and start tracing it calmly back to the root cause.

By the end of this book, you’ll understand the fires, where they start, why they spread, and how to contain them before your entire product melts down in production. Because the real secret of engineering maturity is this: you stop asking, “How do I make it never fail?” And start asking, “How do I make it recover gracefully when it inevitably does?”

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Chapters

The MVP trap

MVPs are supposed to be disposable experiments, but founders treat them like foundation stones. The shortcuts you take to “move fast” quietly become tomorrow’s production nightmares. What starts as duct tape becomes architecture, and suddenly your entire product is built on panic-driven decisions. This chapter exposes why early decisions haunt you, and how to escape before the rewrite becomes inevitable.

Authentication Hell

Auth always looks simple until it isn’t. Auth breaks, tokens expire, session logic collapses, and suddenly users can’t log in while attackers somehow still can. This chapter walks through the quiet horror of authentication systems: bad password logic, patchy MFA, insecure flows, and brittle identity assumptions. It explains how to build auth that works reliably, and doesn’t melt under real users.

Your Database is Crying

Your database isn’t slow, it’s suffering. Unindexed queries, poorly designed schemas, random datatypes, and tables growing like unchecked forests. Meanwhile, your app keeps demanding miracles. This chapter explains how databases get progressively worse with scale, why performance collapses, and what to fix before your usage graphs look like a heart attack.

API Limits and Other Brick Walls

You think your architecture is solid and then someone else’s API rate-limits your entire business. External dependencies become invisible bottlenecks: third-party outages, pagination quirks, quota ceilings, and inconsistent response times. This chapter shows how real-world systems break when they rely too heavily on services you don’t control. Learn how to design around limits instead of slamming into them at full speed.

The Great Secret Leak

Secrets leak because humans are tired, rushed, or overconfident. A misplaced file, a rogue screenshot, a forgotten Git commit, and suddenly your entire infrastructure is exposed. This chapter digs into the psychology and mechanics behind leaks, and lays out the habits, tooling, and guardrails that keep sensitive credentials off the internet and out of attackers’ hands.

Your Frontend is a Lie

Frontends are beautiful liars. They hide failing APIs, broken logic, missing data, and duct-taped backends behind smooth animations and friendly colors. This chapter explores how UI often masks architectural problems, why “it looks good” doesn’t mean “it works,” and how weak frontend decisions can quietly cripple your product.

Scaling - You Can't Just Add More RAM

Scaling isn’t about bigger machines; it’s about smarter architecture. More resources won’t fix unbounded queries, chatty microservices, or runaway background jobs. This chapter breaks down why scaling is a discipline: queues, caches, idempotency, sharding, and more. Real growth reveals every hidden flaw, and hardware can’t save you from bad design.

Team Dynamics: People Start More Fires Than Code

Most outages begin with humans, not systems. Miscommunication, undocumented decisions, rushed deploys, ego-driven shortcuts, that’s where the real fires ignite. This chapter explores the messy human layer: team habits, cultural norms, leadership failures, and the silent chaos of unclear ownership. Fix your people systems and your technical systems magically catch fewer flames.

Building Fireproof Software

Fireproof software isn’t perfect, but resilient. This chapter ties everything together: people, ownership, processes.

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You can’t stop every fire, but you can contain them, recover fast, and build with discipline instead of hope.