The Slack notification pierces through my sleep at 3:17 AM. “Server down. Users can’t log in. Help?”
I stumble to my laptop, squinting at the error logs. Everything looks normal. The database is running, the load balancer is healthy, all services are green. Yet somehow, authentication is broken.
Two hours later, I find it: a single character typo in an environment variable that was deployed six hours ago. One letter. One tiny, insignificant letter that brought down the entire login system.
I fix it, deploy, test, and watch as the monitoring dashboard returns to its peaceful green state. The users will never know that their 3 AM scrolling was interrupted by my fumbling fingers on a keyboard.
This is the unglamorous side of software development. The part that doesn’t make it into the inspiring blog posts about coding bootcamps and startup unicorns.
But there’s something oddly satisfying about being the person who can fix it, even at 3 AM.