There are brave souls in this world—firefighters, surgeons, tightrope walkers. And then, there are software engineers who choose to deploy code on a Friday. They’re not seeking adrenaline; they’re just one Slack ping away from voluntarily diving into the abyss of post-work chaos.

It always starts innocently. The clock ticks 4:45 PM, your weekend plans are neatly lined up, your laptop’s lid is halfway closed, and then—ping. A product manager drops the deadliest message in your chat: “Hey, quick one, can we push that minor fix before EOD? It’s just a color change.” You hesitate. Your gut screams “no,” your logic agrees, but your mouth mutters, “Sure, just give me five minutes.” And thus, you’ve summoned a deployment demon.

You fire up the CI/CD pipeline. Jenkins, your eternally temperamental teammate, glares back at you. The build passes on the second try (after failing the first for no reason), and for a fleeting moment, hope enters your soul. The code is deployed. The feature is live. You even get a celebratory thumbs-up emoji from someone who hasn’t reviewed the code at all. You begin packing up, imagining dinner or a movie.

Then the alerts start.

First, the website’s loading speed slows to that of a dial-up modem in 1999. Then payment gateways begin returning cryptic errors like “Unprocessable Elf” or something equally mythical. Support tickets spike. QA wakes up from their nap. The designer insists the color you just fixed is now more wrong. The staging toggle was accidentally left on in production, users are getting test data, and someone just saw a cat meme on the login page.

Your team scrambles onto a Zoom call with the kind of urgency usually reserved for earthquakes. Everyone’s speaking in abbreviations. Someone yells “rollback,” but the last stable release was three hotfixes and two patch hacks ago. A dev suggests restarting the server. Another suggests restarting your life. You sit there, trying to figure out if this is a bug, a feature, or divine punishment for past sins.

Eventually, at around 11 PM, after merging more blindly than a raccoon in a coal mine, the issue is “kind of” fixed. The site loads. The users are back. No one knows how. You close your laptop, not in triumph, but in silent surrender. You know you’ll pretend this never happened when Monday’s postmortem meeting rolls around.

But deep down, you know the truth. You were once like them—naïve, optimistic, free. Now, you’re a Friday deploy survivor.

🪄Wisdom:

Deploying on Friday isn’t a badge of courage. It’s a coupon for an unpaid weekend shift. Push your code, not your luck.