Tech4d ago
I deployed to prod without testing
What happened
It was Friday afternoon. I was confident my 'small fix' wouldn't break anything. I pushed directly to production without running tests. Within minutes, the checkout flow was broken for thousands of users. My manager got paged. I spent my weekend fixing it while apologizing to everyone.
The impact
The team lost trust in our deployment process. We had to implement mandatory code reviews and staging environments. I felt terrible for weeks.
Lesson learned
No change is too small to test. Friday deployments are never a good idea. My confidence was actually recklessness in disguise.