high maintenance

the comedown off a good maintenance is hard.

you get twisted up beforehand because there’s a lot on the line. production will be down. new code — code you know is buggy — is going out to the world. the site may not come back the way it should and there will come a point when it’s your wits against the latent devilry that lurks in any complicated system.

…and that’s if things go well.

if they don’t go well, there will be a progressive creeping unease in the war room and on the chat as more folks feel the chills of doubt touch them. is it a stinker? did we fuck up somewhere? are the rollback plans enough? maybe the devs ask for more time. maybe they ask for a hand-patch on the live systems. maybe it works, or maybe at some point the balance of evidence tips away from the new stuff and someone makes the tough call to roll it back. that’s a dangerous path but it’s better than chasing the losses of a maintenance gone bad, piling hack on hack until the original plan is in tatters, it’s hours past the allotted window and even if the change does stick, the duct tape’s not gonna last and there will still be hell to pay in the morning.

…not tonight, though.

tonight was a good one. tonight things went as smoothly as anyone could have asked for. sure there were unexpected obstacles, deviations from plan, dependencies somebody overlooked, but the team was functioning as it should. you worked through the problems and ultimately everything fell into place. it was even (pretty much) within the original timeframe. and hey, look, you got to put something new and cool out there. how did that happen? why now and not then? what separates tonight’s mean, lean maintenance machine from the all-too-vividly-remembered nightmares of last week, last month, last year?

…wind it back a few hours.

you’ve done all the prep work, you’ve re- and double-checked down the procedures and checklists, but there’s still some time before the window opens. so you get twisted up because doing well matters and maybe the double espresso makes the difference between a muted ‘eureka’ and another fifteen minutes staring at the screen wondering where the god-damn typo is. because that’s fifteen minutes that the faceless millions can’t get at their stuff, because the service is down, because of you, and that matters. so you ride the caffeine and the adrenaline and the late-night sleep dep until they all blend together to make their own kind of extremely focused, extremely functional high, and that matters too.

…but the comedown’s a bitch.

so when it’s over (and there’s a reluctance to actually call it ‘over’ so you linger on chat and pack up slowly and watch the telltales and make sure nothing’s gonna bite you in a couple of hours) you’re left with a vague sense of emptiness like you ought to be attending to a crisis somewhere but can’t figure out where and it’s already handled anyway. you cast about for something that doesn’t involve staring at a screen for more hours. alcohol suggests it can step right in to fill that void but you’re reluctant to succumb to boozy anesthesia. you want to treasure the last vestiges of the maintenance high, so you write instead.