Thread by @mipsytipsy

I have been truly enjoying all of your messages and tweets about your team discussions on whether to freeze deploys this holiday season. 🥰 A change is in the air. This is good.

The worst outages and lengthiest recoveries of my life have all been due to prolonged deploy freezes over the holidays, and I do not wish that misery on anyone.

You should all get to sleep in, eat pie for breakfast, and come back refreshed, not fight multiweek fires on reentry.

I forgot to check Twitter for a few days, so it was a treat to come back to a nudge from @ianmiell, who wrote this beautiful post on replacing a leader-follower culture with a leader-leader mentality. zwischenzugs.com/2019/11/27/the…

You should read the whole thing -- the review at least, if not the book. ☺️. But the part that made me think of deploys was when he says instead of waiting for orders, he encouraged them to ask permission ("I intend to do x, because y")

This is on a nuclear sub, mind you.

The tactic of "deliberate action" seems particularly applicable to deploying code.

Call out what you're about to do, wait for others to intervene, and then do it if they don't.

In the spirit of the season, here are a few more 🌺🍂practical tips🍃🌺 for an uneventful holiday in production -- ones that won't set you up for a brutal re-entry after it's done.

First and foremost, respect the season. Mid-November to end of December are not "normal" times, and planning should reflect this.

Doesn't mean you can't get plenty of work done, but you will be frustrated if you expect to ship on your normal cadence. So don't.

Humans thrive on seasonal rhythms, and we really crave a break in our normal routine.

Consider spending this time paying down tech debt, or on hack weeks and skunkworks projects, or have a friendly bug bounty.

Holidays will be times when many are distracted and intermittently available, but others will be unusually free to concentrate and hungry to make a difference.

Plan for more individual work, fewer collaborations and dependencies.

Enlist the help of everyone in respecting oncall and ensuring a quiet holiday for those with pagers.

Make holiday on call voluntary, and planned well in advance -- like at least two months. No combining on call + travel.

(Now is a good time to check in with your teammates who aren't going anywhere for the holidays, to make sure they have some solid vacation time planned in 2020.)

Always double up your oncall coverage, even if you don't normally. Primary and secondary.

This can be A GREAT time to focus on improving the state of internal tools. What are the improvements you put off all year because the pace doesn't allow for them?

Use this time to try rolling out honeycomb-style instrumentation. Get tracing working.

Add guard rails to prod. Improve the on boarding experience for new devs. Prototype some shit.

Or -- here's a thought -- maybe use the downtime to *fix your fucking deploys*.

If you absolutely must block something, don't block deploys. Block merges. Make developers wait to merge their code til you are ready to deploy again.

(But consider using feature flags instead. Hey, that's another good holiday plan -- add feature flags, if you don't have em!)

If all else fails, and you truly cannot feel safe unless deploys are blocked: I get it. Could you vow to make this the last time?

You 🌲can🎄 make 2020 the year you improve your tooling and production literacy so you don't have to fear your own deploys. Will you? 🌺