Last Updated: 2024-04-25

I had finished the rewrite_tutor branch, a complicated change that required a careful deploy, and merged it into master, even though I was finishing the day and had no intention of deploying it until tomorrow.

As luck would have it, that evening I noticed I was getting 1000's of exceptions for unrelated causes. But I could not put a hotfix on master, because that would necessitate a deploy of this new rewrite_tutor tutor code, which I didn't want to deal with right now.

I got around by reverting the merge (and choosing to keep a particular side of the master - the one I was merging into) $ git revert -m 1 sha1

Lessons

• Only merge a risky major feature into master just before you deploy. Otherwise you rob yourself of the ability to do hot-fixes.

• The generalization of this is trivial but important for juniors to know: Always work on feature branches. In a separate incident I had some half-finished code on development and a colleague deployed it, as was his right, and of course this unfinished code caused bugs. I should have had this unfinished code in a feature branch until it was ready.