ProgrammerHumor
doNotDeployOnFriday
Discussion
Rule 1: never deploy on Friday
Rule 2: never pick up calls on weekends or vacations
Rule 3: Debug in prod. (for character development)
Rule 4: refresh the prod DB with test one(for thrill and termination )
Rule 5: Don't use transactions. A good programmer doesn't need to rollback
Rule 6: where we're going, we don't need where clauses
Rule 7: only little bitches use version control.
The DB can smell you're scared
Never quite done that before. But we had a fun one where a change was deployed but someone accidentally copied the test connection strings to prod.
So for the whole weekend live transactions were going into test. It sure was fun coming in on Monday and trying to find and extract production data from test back into the prod db.
Rule 4: Accidentally delete prod files to see how quickly can be restored from backup if any (based on a true story)
Rule 3a: Everyone has a test environment. Some also have a prod.
Rule 1 is strictly adhered here, unless you deploy at 7am (so you have the entire morning to troubleshoot and fix it).
After lunchtime, the availability of colleagues reduces sharply.
Over here it's illegal :3
I like my workers laws
I'm assuming there would still be someone available for critical systems right? I know for a fact Europeans get up on the weekend for things like this and they have stronger worker laws.
Brit here - not sure how much of this is a legal requirement. I have an on-call rota in my team. People have to be able to respond within a set time frame, but they do get paid extra just for being on-call (even if nothing happens). People who aren't on-call can be called (and then get paid for it) but there's strictly no consequences if they don't answer.
sometimes there is a vulnerability that requires deploying on a Friday. it's Saturday in Australia right now and we just deployed on a Friday, i.e., yesterday.
Improve your CI/CD and observability to the point where you can deploy on Friday without concern.
Rule 2: never pick up calls on weekends or vacations
Must be nice to be able to blow off customers who need their stuff on the two days of the week that you will not deign to serve them.
Because where I come from, that's enough to make my customers go "bye-bye" and move to a competitor who is not so delicate. Suddenly, JOB go "bye-bye"!
If a company has such customers, they better hire additional staff and cover weekends as well.
If they know shit happens, they better plan deployments for times where there will be someone on shift to fix unexpected outcomes.
Sure - single call like that a year is OK and I would show up. If a company makes it a habit to call staff during their weekend/vacation, it's on them their customers suffer, I can just bring popcorn and watch it burn.
That's a problem for Monday you
wait. why do I see Monday me standing in the doorway with a knife?
Not enough weekend drinks
Not getting a other job by Monday
This is why you put your phone to silent mod
does not work if your anxiety has surround sound
Friday after market close (financial systems). Safest time of week to deploy.
One Monday morning I had my manager, his manager, and his manager's manager all bring me into a room.
"After you left Friday afternoon, the team was up late to solve a problem..."
I left at 6pm because I had a regularly scheduled commitment that everyone already knew about. We had deployed Friday morning and nobody had complained about anything before I left.
Still, they crapped on me and told me how I left the team hanging and made it sound like they pulled my weight. Well, it's not my fault they go straight from dev to production on a Friday without any QA process...
Apparently they stayed in the office until 10pm. No one told me anything, no one asked.
They could not solve the problem. It was a very small code change that I did in the morning and then we hot fixed into production. Completely incompetent team, I'm so glad I quit.
I once swapped a core router on a Friday evening. They only had a four hour outage on Monday.
As someone working a helpdesk. LET US KNOW WHEN YOURE DOING MAINTENANCE! I hate having to wake up 5 people for a whole region being "down" come to find out there was an email 2 weeks prior that said there might be maintenance. But that email wasn't even sent to my department so oh well.
I used to work in telephony. No carrier would allow us to deploy from the week before Thanksgiving to the week after New Year's day.
He violates the unspoken rule. "Never. Deploy. On. Friday."
Had the client fuck up deploying a new feature on a Saturday and ended up calling a very hung over me at 7am asking if I can recover the database
Me to PM: I don't care if our client cannot hold his shit in any longer, I ain't deploying on a Friday evening!
That moment of panic is unreal and invigorating. You’ll never feel more alive or dead, simultaneously, than that.
Do not give out your private contact info
Its everyone calling to thank you for the amazing feature. Right?
I've interviewed with a company that literally had this listed in the benefits: "we never deploy on Fridays, we never deploy in the afternoon".
Didn't we learn this lesson a year ago?
happened to me last week. Was updating the online store's payment system and apparently the new one had issues with our ip. It wasn't my fault or bad code, just some hosting or banking fuckup, but anyway callbacks didn't come through and the system just gave out links and files (products) for free even if you didn't pay. Good times. Took me three days to try EVERYTHING until hosting support was like yeah haha we changed your server ip and it works know we don't know why it didn't lol.
I also deployed on Friday.
Except it was to a dev environment so did I really deploy?
The pennsylvanian 911 contractor wondering how they took down the statewide system on friday afternoon.
I think, for startups Friday deployments is fine.
I literally just remembered we had a data import running with a timeout of 48 hours that I was supposed to check and retrigger because the timeout wasn't long enough (long story)... It timed out 7 hours ago and this post reminded me, fuck!
Ever deployed on Sunday?
That's when I do deploy, means if something has gone catastrophic and discovered at 8.00am, i can roll back to 11.00pm with little data loss. Early hours of Monday morning is the lowest use of our system.
Doing it on a Friday, but not picking up the severity until Monday could be over 48 hours of loss if a serious issue not detected until then.
Luckily in 15 years I've only ever had to roll back a serious fuck up once, and could manually recover the data at a later date as it was less than 12 hours worth.
That's why our frontend teams ship on Monday at 7pm.
We historically have Wednesday 9pm for small releases (it automatically goes live, no need to be there). Usually enough time to fix it the next morning unless you broke it completely.
Big releases go live on 3 Saturdays at 3pm - thats for anything that cannot be done without interruption (e.g. breaking db changes, network changes, etc.)
No, I don’t hate myself that much
But you can fix everything from Monday on at normal work time!
Sunday is an infinitely better time to deploy than Friday (literally the worst time to deploy). If devs are not working when a problem needs to be fixed then it’s going to take way more time to fix. Sunday is closer to working hours than Friday (though the best time is midweek when everyone is in work mode and can focus on the issue).
Yeah, once.
Came back Monday to Jira tickets titled ‘Who did this?’ 😭