Never deploy on Christmas Eve

Somebody is going to push a change today. Statistically it is a small change. Statistically it will be fine. And a small number of people reading this are going to spend part of tomorrow on the phone about it.

The rule is not "do not deploy on Fridays," which is the version that gets repeated and is slightly wrong. Plenty of shops deploy on Fridays safely, because they can roll back in a minute and somebody is watching.

The actual rule is: do not deploy when nobody is available to fix it.

That is why Christmas Eve is worse than a Friday. Not the day. The fact that your client's office is shut, your hosting support is skeleton staffed, the one person who understands the payment integration is on a plane, and you personally are going to be somewhere with two bars of signal and a relative asking about crypto.

If you must ship today, the checklist is short.

Can you roll back in under five minutes, and have you done it before, so you know that you can? Is there a person, named, who will look at their phone tomorrow? Have you actually loaded the live site after deploying, on a phone, on cellular data, rather than trusting a green checkmark?

And the one everybody skips: does anything in this change touch money? Payments, forms that create leads, phone routing. If yes, it waits. There is no change so valuable that it beats a week of unnoticed failed checkouts over a holiday.

Most of the time nothing happens. That is exactly why the habit forms.