Production Is Not a Joke: A Lesson I Learned the Hard Way

Source: Dev.to

Background

I’m sharing a painful experience we had while deploying a simple product to production. The product’s only responsibility was to register users—no heavy business logic.

Deployment Issues

The DevOps team never explained how the infrastructure worked, so we built the product assuming things would “just work.”

Spoiler: they didn’t.

The first real deployment session lasted six hours, staring at a simple “Hello World” just to verify that the backend and frontend were running. My patience ran out quickly.

During the deployment of the backend to production, the following exchange occurred:

• DevOps team: The backend can’t start because it can’t read the database. Please create a script to create the database.
• Me: What do you mean? Are you saying we need to create a script to create the database if it doesn’t exist?
• DevOps team: Yes.
• Me: … OK.

I said “OK” because I remembered some advice I once received:

“To fight, you need two people.”

We hadn’t researched enough how the infrastructure works.

“Senior, look at me. Don’t stress. I’m 30 years old, and I already look like I’m 50.”

Lessons Learned

• Never assume—always ask how the infrastructure works.
• Sometimes it’s better not to fight at all; patience, communication, and learning the hard way are often the best solutions.

I’m only 26 years old and don’t want to become a meme of a stressed senior developer.

Thanks for reading my story. 😉