Concrete
You have about forty-five minutes. Make them count.
Overview
Concrete is the material of foundations, slabs, footings, and everything else a building pushes against. It is unlike most materials in that it has a clock. Once the truck arrives, you have a window. The window closes. There is no rescheduling with set concrete.[1]
The Pour
- Forms before concrete. The form is the shape. Get the form right or get it wrong for 50 years.
- Rebar before pour. Tensile strength comes from steel. Concrete alone is strong in compression only.
- The slump is the slump. Don't add water to make it easier. Ever.
- Screed, float, trowel. In that order. Patience between each.
- Control joints are not optional. Concrete cracks. The only question is where. You decide where.
- Cure it. The first 72 hours matter.
Software Parallel
Concrete is the closest construction analog to a database migration. Once it runs, the shape is set. You can chip away at it. You cannot move it. Plan the migration the way you'd plan a pour: forms (schema), rebar (indexes), control joints (feature flags), and curing (a post-migration soak time where you do not touch anything).
"Everyone remembers their first bad pour. It is also usually their last." — Burbridge
See Also
References
- Concrete oral tradition. "The truck is here."