Somewhat off topic war story time. About five years ago I was in hospital with appendicitis the day before Black Friday. We had a promotion set to run on our online store starting at midnight UK time (where we are). We are a tiny company, literally my wife, myself (the only tech) and at the time one other none technical employee. Fortunately, I thought, everything was ready to go, specific promotion code read to automatically run at midnight, so wasn’t too worried about being out of action.

Having been waiting all day I was finally sent down for surgery at 8pm, I was quite a low priority case. I vaguely remember waking up in recovery and being wheeled back to the ward. At just before midnight we are about to go live with the promotion so I take a quick look at the site and all is running fine. 12.00 ticks rounds, refresh the site, it’s gone, error 500, damn! I had overlooked something and broken the site just before the biggest proportion of the year.

Somehow, and I don’t fully remember, I manage to fix it from my phone. We host on Heroku, and my dev environment is on my laptop at home. I had a Digital Ocean VM sitting unused, but with key based auth only. I somehow manage to install a ssh client on my phone, grab the key from my password manager. Login and install the full dev environment (Python venv, Postgres, Node, Heroku CLI), debug and patch the code. And finally push the fix to Heroku.

I have no idea how long it took, I was certainly still fuzzy from the general anaesthetic, but I got it fixed!

I now ensure I always have a dev environment installed on a vm, and access setup from a ssh client on my phone.

It’s certainly possible to do software development, the traditional kind, from your phone, but I don’t recommend it.