One company I joined was cleaning up the last vestiges of “customize it for every customer by letting people edit their copy on server,” which predictably turned into a mess. They were all very small customizations to styles or images but enough to make upgrades a total mess.

I did work at a company where despite having full source control they didn’t actually know of they could ever deploy the server component again. Edits got made to the live server but then made again in source control, or vice versa. There was one more senior person who couldn’t be talked out of their old workflow.

In theory everything matched.Eventually they even checked and got it all under control where they were positive it was the same and kept it that way.

But it had only ever been deployed from scratch… once. And for like 15 years it lived there and kept getting upgraded. It would all be moved when new hardware was brought in.

But it wasn’t installed from scratch. We truly did not know if we were capable of doing that. It is possible if that server was destroyed and we couldn’t restore from a back up it would take us an unknown amount of time. Even though in theory deploying should be as simple copying the files and starting the web server.

Were there odd configurations that had been made eight years ago that kept it running? Some strange permission changed somewhere?

I wasn’t on that team. But it always made me nervous. That was absolutely a core application of the business.

I really like small shops sometimes. You get a lot of freedom and get to have your hands in a lot of disciplines. You learn a lot of things, including things that’s should never be duplicated.