Shipping happens once. Running is the condition you are in afterwards, and it lasts as long as the project does. The moment your work is live it can break at three in the morning while you are asleep, in a way you first hear about from a stranger. Building did not prepare you for that, because building is a loop you control and running is a loop reality controls.
This chapter is the small set of habits that keep a live project survivable for one person. None of it is advanced. Most of it takes an afternoon to set up once and then costs you nothing. The order matters: you have to be able to read a failure before you can be told about one, and you have to be able to restore before you can safely change anything.
- Errors and logs: where failures actually appear, how to read a stack trace, and how to turn "it's broken" into something an AI can fix.
- Knowing it broke before your users tell you: uptime checks, error tracking, and the gap between "it deployed" and "it works".
- Backups, and the day you need one: what to copy, how often, and why an untested backup is not a backup.
- What it costs to run, and what runs away: the bill at zero users, and the four ways it becomes a bill you did not plan.
- Updates and dependencies: security advisories, patch versus major, and letting an AI do the upgrade you actually read.
- Changing a live thing safely: small changes, known rollbacks, and why database migrations are the dangerous ones.