I love sharing these sorts of mistakes.

I love sharing these sorts of mistakes. Thankfully, I’ve only had a few gut-wrenching moments and they’ve all been largely recoverable.

The worst panic situation I had was when my hosting provider decided that after a single failed payment (through no fault of my own) they would shut down AND delete our server without warning. Thankfully we had almost everything on staging.

The key lessons to learn quickly are:

1. MAKE BACKUPS!
2. Seriously… MAKE BACKUPS!
3. Make sure of your context before you do something dangerous— are you really working on staging? Never do anything in production! The old carpentry adage “measure twice, cut once” springs to mind…
4. Don’t try to cut corners: faster != quicker.
5. Just like in real life, avoid the SKODA! Try to use/create tools that ask you to confirm complex and potentially dangerous changes, i.e. to avoid the Single Keystroke of Destructive Action.