Deploying on a Friday and Other Developer Horrors
Monsters under the bed are not the only things that keep me up at night. As a developer, I have faced my fair share of horrors, but not the kind that go bump in the night. My nightmares come in the form of rogue deployments, missing documentation, and the dreaded phrase: we don’t have a backup.
So, in the spirit of Halloween, here are ten spine-tingling phrases that send shivers down my spine faster than a cold cup of coffee.
1. “I just deployed straight to production.”
The software equivalent of playing with a Ouija board during a thunderstorm. They should not do it in the movies and we definitely should not do it on a Friday afternoon.
2. “It works on my machine.”
Brilliant. Shall we cast a spell and send your haunted laptop to all our users, then?
3. “I’ve dropped the wrong database.”
And just like that, the lights flickered and the backups were also corrupted. The ghost of Little Bobby Tables laughs somewhere far away.
4. “No, it’s not in version control.”
Somewhere, Octocat just shed a single tear.
5. “I assume it works. I’ve not tested it.”
Bold strategy. Let’s see if it pays off in production. Get ready to be working through the witching hour.
6. “We have a lot of legacy users running Internet Explorer.”
The real undead. IE users who refuse to move on. Are they trapped for all eternity, never seeing a webpage render properly? Perhaps that is the tenth circle of developer hell.
7. “Can’t we break process just this once?”
Famous last words before the gruesome and bloody post-mortem.
8. “I copied this CLI command from Stack Overflow.”
A black box of mystery code that may or may not summon the ultimate evil: sudo rm -rf /*
9. “Hey, it works! But I don’t know why.”
The software gods have smiled upon us. A treat, or is it simply a trick waiting to explode months later?
10. “I’ll just run this command as root.”
Because what is Halloween without a little chaos magic?
While these quotes might make us laugh (or cry), they are all too real in the world of development. So this Halloween, let’s light a candle for clean code, tested features, and version-controlled everything.
And remember: always check twice before you deploy, or you might just summon something you can’t debug.