There I was, on a Friday evening, watching a band get ready to play at a festival. My phone went wobbly and I got one of those dreaded messages: “Hey, the site is down. Can you please check?

One of my customers’ websites had crashed, ungraciously. In the worst possible way. And, of course, it was crashing as part of a campaign that had just started and needed to run smoothly.

Imagine me, standing at a festival in the harbour of Hamburg, an hour away from my PC, with a project that has just gone sideways and I need to fix it as soon as possible. Fun times!

With adrenaline running high, I fumbled with my phone, scrolling through logs on the tiny screen, using websites that were not well optimised for mobile, trying to figure out what was going on with an annoyingly spotty internet connection. Surprisingly, I managed to fix it on my phone within minutes, despite the severity of the crash. Fortunately, it was a minor issue and did not require any code changes. But even that would have been possible.

So after a few minutes I was back watching and listening to the band again, it took me a few moments to realise that I was able to fix this on a mobile phone while standing in a crowd of people listening to a band in the middle of a festival in a dockyard by the harbour.

Yeah, not your typical Friday evening or bug-fixing procedure, I guess. I’m still amazed that it went as smoothly and easily as it did.

For now I’d better go back and finish this post-mortem to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Although it’s amazing that it went so “well”, I really don’t need that kind of adrenaline rush on a Friday evening.