Crashing Prod: A Developer's Journey From Terror to Routine

Description

A two-panel meme that contrasts the emotional reaction to crashing a production server over time. The top panel is captioned, 'FIRST TIME I CRASH PRODUCTION'S SERVER' and features a well-known image of a young boy (actor Osita Iheme) crying with a look of deep distress and panic. The bottom panel, captioned '26th TIME I CRASH PRODUCTION'S SERVER', shows the same boy with a smug, nonchalant, and almost dismissive expression. This meme resonates deeply with experienced software engineers, illustrating the evolution from the sheer terror of a junior developer causing their first major outage to the jaded desensitization of a senior engineer for whom production incidents are a recurring, manageable part of the job

Common Tags

ProductionIssues ProductionIncidents ProductionBugs ProductionFirefighting Devops DeveloperHumor OnCall DeploymentFailures

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick The first time you crash prod, you're terrified you'll get fired. The 26th time, you're just annoyed it happened before you finished your coffee and you start the post-mortem with 'Well, as per tradition...'

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

The first time you crash prod, you're terrified you'll get fired. The 26th time, you're just annoyed it happened before you finished your coffee and you start the post-mortem with 'Well, as per tradition...'
Anonymous

First prod crash: schedule a blameless post-mortem; 26th crash: call it “unscheduled chaos engineering,” hit kubectl rollout undo, and finish your latte
Anonymous

After your 26th production outage, you realize the real high availability strategy was the emotional calluses you developed along the way - and that your incident postmortems have become more templated than your Terraform configs
Anonymous

The journey from 'Oh God, I need to update my resume' to 'Ah yes, Tuesday' - a senior engineer's guide to production incidents. By incident #26, you've learned that panic doesn't fix servers any faster than calm acceptance, and your incident response time has actually improved because you're no longer paralyzed by existential dread. The real production readiness was the emotional calluses we developed along the way
Anonymous

First prod crash: SEV-1 panic; 26th: flip the feature flag, hit rollback, and call it “exercising the error budget” while the postmortem template auto-fills my name
Anonymous

By incident 26 you don’t panic - you kubectl rollout undo, paste the RCA template, and realize change management still treats prod as staging with better data
Anonymous

First crash: therapy session. 26th: just another Tuesday runbook update
@panzer_maus 4y

haha classic😎