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He's also caused significant downtime by doing this, so this may not be a good lesson to take for your own sites.

Actually I don't think any of the outages have been caused by this. The prospect does add an edge of excitement to programming though. Gamification for programmers!

There was one outage caused by a runaway which testing would have easily caught; I think about last year.

Are you thinking of this outage from last month?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261591

There was something from >1y ago.

Probably this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5239673

(I remembered "new user" so was able to get a search to work...)

Good catch. But strictly speaking that wasn't doing development in the repl, but repairing data. The live server is the only place you can repair data on the live server.

Yep. That's the kind of thing which is fun for hn but wouldn't be a good idea at all on a financial system -- where you optimize for least bad likely worst case, not best best case.

That's interesting insight. I wonder what would happen if Bank of America took that same approach to pushing changes...

...what about the White House?

;)

If there is any world where the 95th percentile programmer at BOA is as good as pg, perhaps.

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