Why I Secretly Love Playing Deployment Roulette. “Friday at 4:59 PM”

🎲 1. The Dev’s Guilty Pleasure

The Scene:

• 4:58 PM Friday
• Your mouse hovers over git push
• That little voice whispers: “Live a little.”

Why We Do It:

• The Thrill: Like skydiving, but with merge conflicts
• The Ego Trip: “If this works, I’m a god”
• The Rebellion: Screams “I don’t need work-life balance!” (while crying into weekend coffee)

💣 2. Famous Last Words

Actual Pre-Disaster Slack Messages:

• “It’s just docs!” (broke the docs site)
• “I tested it locally!” (…on Node v12)
• “The users won’t even notice!” (CEO gets 404 on demo)

🤵 3. Corporate vs. Startup Rules

Enterprise:

• Deploy window: Tuesday 2-3 AM
• Approvals needed: 17
• Actual risk: 0.0001%

Startups:

• Deploy window: Whenever
• Approvals needed: “lol”
• Actual risk: “Does anyone still have AWS access?”

🛠️ 4. How to (Almost) Get Away With It

The “Safe” Friday Deploy Checklist:

✅ Wrap it in a feature flag (then forget to turn it off)
✅ Blame timezones (“It’s already Monday in Kiribati!”)
✅ Bribe Ops with pizza (extra cheese = extra rollback speed)

Pro Tip:

Name your branch THURSDAY_TEST_DONT_DEPLOY for plausible deniability.

📈 5. The Data Behind the Madness

• 67% of critical outages start with “harmless” Friday changes (2024 PagerDuty report)
• 92% of devs lie “I’ll fix it Monday” (GitLab survey)
• 100% of managers pretend they’ve never done it

🚨 6. When It Goes Exactly Right

That one magical time:

• The deploy worked
• The metrics improved
• You became a legend
  (This is how addictions start)

💼 7. Corporate Cover-Up Tactics

How Teams Hide Friday Deploys:

• “Scheduled job” (scheduled for “now”)
• “Security patch” (for a vulnerability that doesn’t exist)
• “It’s just a revert!” (of your own Thursday mistake)

🎉 8. The Friday Deployment Hall of Fame

Notable Disasters:

• The Emoji Incident: 🚀 deploy crashed rocket emoji rendering in 12 countries
• The “Let’s Delete Logs” Fiasco: rm -rf meets Monday morning
• The Silent Killer: A console.log that somehow broke IE11 (RIP)

🛑 9. How to Stop (But Let’s Be Real, You Won’t)

Therapy Steps:

1. Admit you have a problem (“Hi, I push on Fridays”)
2. Use “No-Fri-Deploys” GitHub action
3. Book fake meetings (“Dog dentist appointment”)

Relapse Hotline:

“Just one more CSS tweak, I swear—”

🏁 10. The Honest Truth

“We don’t do Friday deploys because we’re reckless. We do them because Monday-you deserves to suffer.”