Anxiety pushing commits
Just wondering if this is common. Whenever I’m pushing a decent sized update live, I get a good hour or so of anxiety/stress symptoms.
Of course everything’s been tested locally, but I’m always worried I’ve overlooked an error that will send emails out to all my customer’s customers or delete a load of important records.
Heightened emotions seems like a rational response to those stakes, but I can’t recall hearing l anyone else really mention this.
Is this pretty normal? Or am I just overthinking things? I generally consider myself fairly stoic, so am interested to hear.
I've had that before too. Actually, I've got a bit of it now for some contract work, partially because I have someone monitoring bug reports who is rather abusive. Everything is phrased as an insult, even for the tiniest and most insignificant things. Rather sad really. I feel sorry for him because the behaviour comes from personal insecurities and/or psychological issues. I do my best to ignore the insults, but it's still unpleasant to deal with.
Like the others said, having a good set of automated tests helps ease anxiety. Also, if you have QA/beta testers, give them a good amount of time to test before releasing to end-users. I've often had no report for three weeks, and then someone suddenly finds a bug.
I also never release any updates on Friday or late evenings, because if something goes wrong, then there goes my weekend (which I need to relax and recharge).
Sorry to hear about your situation, sounds like you’re dealing with it the right way.
Ok thanks, I’ll try that
Might want to look into increasing your automated testing, if you're running tests for each release manually, theres a chance you'll miss something one time.
Also a good idea to break your changes down into smaller pieces so each release is less risky. Not always possible, but good thing to strive for.
pretty normal. keep going!
I think it's pretty normal. I find the easiest way to reduce that anxiety is having enough testing that you're confident (both manual and automated) and having adequate backups. If you have both of those in place, you'll feel a lot better typically.
I used to have it but it seems to fade away completely now. A couple of questions I ask that help me:
Also, for big updates, I often try to split them into smaller ones, where I'm more confident things won't break.
Very helpful, thanks Sergey
It's good to have some dose of fear that your action could potentially do some harm. However, if it becomes too big, then you need to work on it a bit.
I worked on a project where money was involved (on a monthly basis) and I know this feeling. One way to reduce the stress level is to figure out some backup plan that will be always up to date and that you could pull it in no time. It can be like a revert script or whatever it is in your case.
Nice idea, I suppose I just need to account for DB migrations, as we seem to be adding new columns quite often.
The money thing is probably the crux of it. The app in question is a Shopify app that deals with store’s product pages and pre-orders. So the thought of hurting a Small business is grating. That said, we seem to be more respectful when modifying stores than a lot of apps.
Thanks all, that’s really helpful, glad I asked. I think I do need to carve out some time to get more automated testing implemented.
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