Recently I pushed a change straight to production by myself with no approval and violated many rules but it saved us and carried us for weeks. Worse case if it broke, rollback would happen under in under 30 seconds.

I did it because not only did I triple check, I’ve kept mental track of the number of regressions and issues that have been logged against all of my work throughout my career. I’m good at determining risk and I know my bug rate is very low (I git blame every bug to find out who and why caused it. I don’t tell my coworkers but it does play a role in who gets what kind of tickets.) I did what I did because frankly I know it was going to work and no one was going to complain. And truthfully, I’ve done this at different companies several times. Of course, it’s still never a light decision and I rarely ever do it.

But if someone asks me if they could do the same thing, I would not be able to tell them. They would have to keep track of the same details and to be honest, if someone is asking if they can break rules, they probably shouldn’t.

This is the “tension.”