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Discussion on: How do you cope with a problem that you can't solve?

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lbonanomi profile image
lbonanomi • Edited

First of all I hope your operation went well and I wish you a speedy recovery.

Everything you have described sounds like a formula for a whopping outage.

  • One developer on the tools post-install.
  • No escalation path.
  • Hotfixes in prod.
  • No systems folks around?
  • No hand-off to the next developer?

If you're a line developer some of this is probably out of your hands, and some of it you might be able to change through advocacy and setting good examples.

  • If there's no policy for incident response please ask about getting one drafted ASAP
  • Talk to the DBA(s) and admin(s) about availability during rollouts.
  • You stop work after a peer is logged-in and briefed on what's happening and what you've tried to sort things out.
  • Have a postmortem meeting and make the findings public.

Sticking to documented procedure isn't sexy or exciting, but it lets me sleep the sleep of the righteous.