Zen and the Art of Crisis Management

Been in this exact situation myself a couple of times - one instance that has stuck with me was when >300 sites crashed within around 5 minutes of each other due to a time-sensitive bug.

This was my first job out of University, so I had the unpleasant pleasure of seeing both sides of the coin; my manager panicked, but the senior developer didn't. I got roped into a pointless panic-driven hunt for viruses / corrupted installs / whatever by my manager (at one point we were analysing the assembly code in DOS debug, for some reason), while the senior dev calmly reverse-engineered the crash conditions, reproduced the problem and found the root (a negative index into an empty array, written by the MD of the company).

It was on that weekend I decided to renege on my old panicky habits, and become the calm center of reason in the face of a crisis.

Hey folks, this is Max from Big Bang Technology in Toronto. You should read this article if you've ever pushed buggy code into production and had people around you start freaking the hell out.

Hope you enjoy, and I'm looking forward to the discussion.

Best,

Max