Okay, I really shouldn’t be making changes to a live system, even if we’re doing the quality assurance testing and there are lots of bugs I’m just itching to mark “closed”. =) It just becomes too much of a headache, trying to fix all the new bugs introduced by the fixes for the old ones… <laugh>

You’d think that I’d know this lesson by now. The last time I had a majorly stressful deployment was when I created a registration system for my university’s alternative class program. It was working all very well and good, and then–I don’t know, was it a feature request or a last-minute bug–I needed to modify it while everything was running in production. I remember getting into that heightened alertness that I used to feel during programming competitions, when I could feel the time pressure but I could also feel myself actively calming down and focusing on what I needed to do, muttering the mantra “don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic” as I tried to make small changes that wouldn’t break anything currently running.

Today, I’m not going to do that, and I hope to keep avoiding the stress. Today, if I spot any defects I want to close, I’ll work on it on my local system, commit the code, and wait until we close this phase before updating the server. =)

The apprentice’s road is long and full of lessons… =)