The Day I Broke Production

By Anis Timur Shayk | September 1, 2024

It all started with a tiny change. Just one line of code. But it turned into a very long night.

Act 1: The Commit

I was working on a simple feature — add a new field to the user profile. I made the change, pushed it to production... and suddenly, our user dashboard wasn't loading. Oops.

My first thought? "This can't be happening." But it was. I had just broken production.

Act 2: Chaos Ensues

Logs started filling up with errors. Slack blew up. The team was pinging me. I scrambled to roll back the change, but I'd already nuked half the cache. My heart rate? 180 bpm.

• I learned how to triage a live incident.
• I learned to test even the smallest changes properly.
• And I learned our backup system actually works (thank god).

Act 3: The Fix

We spent the next few hours restoring service, adding tests, and writing a postmortem. It was a mess — but one of the most educational messes I've been in.

“Mistakes are proof you're trying.”

In the end, everything was fine. We shipped the fix, updated our deploy process, and I got some sleep. But I'll never forget what it felt like to break production — and bounce back.