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Comment by rue | Hacker News Reader

Not the best idea, if you don't debug as well under such pressure. Some people do.

Or, more commonly, people think they don't perform well under this kind of pressure, but they actually do. Usual scenario:

Employee calls the CEO of the company in the middle of the night panicked, saying the site is down and there is no way they can fix the problem, they don't even have the right skill set.

CEO tells the employee to calm down and do their best.

Site is back online twelve minutes later.

More likely, the developer can handle the tech pressure, but having his/her manager FREAKING OUT and over his shoulder asking questions the whole time is what really causes the slowdown.

Step 0. in getting started with continuous deployment is having an organization that doesn't lose it's mind every time there's a blip.

That often means you need managers who are especially good at (or at least dedicated to) deflecting the freak out/crazy.

CD won't increase your changed related incidents, but to paraphrase the IBM parable, "no one ever got fired, for doing quarterly releases, and heavy QA."

I used to code for a website handling about 25,000 logged in users per day, and there was a post-commit hook on SVN which pushed changes live, immediately. Working on that taught me a lot (mostly how not* to do things), one thing I learnt is that I code much, much faster under that kind of pressure.

* Note: I am not endorsing this as a setup, it's crazy. I don't think I've ever seen such high staff turnover.

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