Deploying on Fridays?

If you’re reading this on a Friday afternoon and you’re staring at a PR titled “Just a quick fix”, close the tab, open your terminal, and type:

git reset --hard origin/master
rm -rf node_modules # The JS guys need this for good luck

Then go touch grass. Because what you’re about to do is the software industry’s version of yelling “Hold my beer” right before natural selection happens.

The Sacred Law

There’s an unwritten law in software engineering

Thou shall not deploy on Friday after 2p.m unless thou hatest the entire team on-call

This law is older than Docker, older than microservers, even older than companies that have their root branch as “main”. It was written in stone right after “Do not rewrite the entire backend in Rust the week before Black Friday.”

The Five Stages of a Friday Deployment

1. Optimism (2:13p.m)

   “It’s just a one-line change. Literally one line. The tests passed. I can even merge this in my sleep.”

2. Hubris (2:27 pm)

   “This is small, let me make the change ASAP. The evening meeting will swing in my favour. My portrait will hang in the office kitchen, right next to the water dispenser.” or so you tell yourself while patting yourself on the back.

3. The Incident (3:02 p.m)

   Production is now returning 502s. The database is speaking in tongues. The monitoring dashboard looks like a Christmas tree that swallowed a rave. Slack is on fire. The engineering manager is typing “what did you do” with increasing aggression.

4. Bargaining(4.45 p.m)

   You’re about to start the usual “But it’s working fine on my locallhost”. You’re promising the world you’ll now read the “Terms and Conditions” before clicking ‘Agree’ if the logs would give you a clue. You consider sacrificing an intern to the DevOps gods.

5. Weekend through the roof (6:00 p.m - Sunday 11:59 pm)

   You are now legally married to PagerDuty. Your significant other has left you for someone who has weekends. Your cat misses you. Your plants are dead. You haven’t seen sunlight since the release of that first AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti.

Quotes from Developers who deployed on Friday

• “It was literally a typo in the config” - Famous last words, June 2022

• “The CI passed, why wouldn’t production be fine?” - Man who now sleeps in office, since mid 2025

Rational excuses to avoid Friday deploys

• Sudden religious conversion (you now observe “No-Deploy Jumu’ah”)

• Your cat is having an existential crisis and needs emotional support

• Mercury is in retrograde and Jenkins is moody lately

My thoughts

1. If it can wait until Monday, it must wait until Monday.

2. “it’s just a one-liner” is how every war crime in software history started

3. Schedule the deploy for Monday 9:05a.m. Then immediately book a “dentist appointment” for 9:00-11:00a.m. You’re welcome.

Deploying on Friday isn’t brave. It isn’t dedication to the craft. It’s just performance art titled “How to convert weekend plans into PTSD”. And if you absolutely must deploy on Friday, atleast update your LinkedIn to “Open to Work” first.

Thank you very much for your attention to this matter. Now go forth and sin no more…