This past Thursday began like many other days at Automattic. I woke up a bit late in the morning and reached over to grab my phone so I could catch up on the company chatter.
Beau posted a few messages to let me know that he was pushing version 1 of some experimental code we were testing for a small group of Automatticians. We had tested the patch the night before, so I was pretty confident.
I hopped out of bed and went to the bathroom so I could get ready for the day. Within minutes, chatter started picking up…
It’s Broken in wp-admin
Turns out that for all of the testing I had done the previous day, I never thought to see what the experimental feature looked like in wp-admin. :facepalm:
On the plus side, I had written all of the code for this feature, so when I heard what was wrong, I had a really good idea of what caused it and how to fix it. I was able to fix the issue and test that it worked across several sites within 10 minutes. But, this was only the beginning…
Today was also the day that I would finally get commit access to WordPress.com. This meant that along with fixing the patch that was just committed, I would also have to figure out how to commit to WordPress.com without breaking all the things. I was a bit nervous…
That First Patch
Beau gave me a quick rundown of the process for committing and deploying to WordPress.com and then let me get to work with a final, “let me know if you run into any issues.”
To say I was nervous at this point would be an understatement. I’ve pushed to repositories before that were owned by a small team, but knowing that what I committed pretty shortly would be affecting millions of people was a bit surreal.
After triple checking that the latest patch worked correctly, and running svn up multiple times, I finally committed the code, but not being familiar with vim, I accidentally posted without a message.
Thoughts
I was able to learn more about the deploy process as well as successfully commit a patch. After everything was said and done, I didn’t break WordPress.com and I learned, so I’ll call it a success.
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