I used to ship and pray. Mainnet felt like an ICU monitor — the code was live, but survival wasn’t guaranteed. You deploy, you watch, you wait. There’s a strange helplessness in that moment, when your logic exists on-chain but could fail under pressure at any second. Blocks finalize, transactions confirm, and you stare at dashboards hoping nothing breaks.
On #Fogo that ritual changed. Transaction simulation became the real deployment. Instead of relying on synthetic benchmarks or clean test environments, I replay load using real traffic shapes — the messy, imperfect patterns that resemble production. I run the same execution profiling multiple times on identical simulation inputs. Not for luck, but for variance. Because state behaves differently across runs. The system reveals its weak points slowly, and never in exactly the same way twice.
“Tested” used to be the word I relied on. It sounds solid, reassuring. But it was misleading. “Staged” feels more accurate. Maybe even “pretended.” Pre-deployment testing isn’t confidence — it’s controlled panic. It’s exposing your architecture to stress before users unknowingly do it for you.
On Fogo, runtime modeling shows where execution will choke before you feel the pain in production. Lock contention, account conflicts, latency drift — execution replay feels like a form of time travel. You get to witness potential failure in advance. It’s expensive. It’s slow. But it’s still less costly than production grief.
I still ship with fear. The difference is that now the fear is specific. Named. Measured. Dormant — until proven awake.