I’ve been trying to figure out why the new features in yesterday’s software release wasn’t working - at all.

-I checked the release checksums (which tell you that the files installed are the versions you think they are). They matched. -I re-ran my unit tests to see if the new features worked in development. They did. -I pored over the source code to see what could have caused it to fail in production. I didn’t find anything. -Eventually, I was trying pretty much random stuff - I went to the production server and looked at the date on the executable file. …April 3rd?!

Finally, after more searching, I figured it out - Operations had installed the new version correctly… on the wrong server. Per my instructions.

My release scripts auto-generate deployment instructions (because you can only type the damn thing so many times before you want to kick in your monitor). I had copied the config from a different project, without changing the server name.

Tiny mistake, made to look very big by our tedious release process. When do I get to just sit down and write code again?