The accidental rollback before the holidays

Shae
3 min readDec 21, 2020

Twas the day before holiday break, when all through the repo,

Not a pull request was stirring, not even a fix for a typo;

The week’s feature updates were shipped early in the week with care,

In hopes that Friday would be a day without deployment fare;

The new chart behind a feature flag, while the backend fixed data strays,

And Sofia shipping new design work, and I with one last polish pre-holidays,

Had just settled in for a Friday of meetings,

Thinking the only things to send were holiday greetings-

When out of the feedback Slack channel there arose such a clatter,

That Sofia and I sprang to see what was the matter.

Through the code we traced like a flash,

Threw open the deployment logs, threw up the Rollbar dash.

Tall bars shadowed the day the network config change was shipped,

Gave the illusion that a change on a different platform had slipped,

When, what to the clouding platforms and services view would clear,

But a different version of the network config in the deployment logs would appear;

With some help of a publishing yaml file with a developer email,

We learned who the rollback had come from, the specific individual;

More rapid than eagles the @ tags they came,

To the person who deployed, did you mean to make this change?

With the questions, so lively and quick,

The person knew they had messed up with that one click.

As dry leaves before the wild hurricane fly,

So after releasing the latest version, the error report was dry;

Such holiday cheer to not be stuck in an error trance,

Of each little failed network POST request,

As I drew in my head, and again the merge request board was clear,

Happy Holidays, and the accidental rollback was fixed before the New Year!

Based on “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, by Anonymous in 1823

Original digital art using XP-PEN and Krita

Featuring Sofia Levin, my teammate

Dedicated to Johnathan Angarita: To my teammate in the international worker struggle, Happy Holidays!

--

--