[kstrauser]

Sigh. I worked at a shop that was spending months waterfalling a frontend to some background API calls. I finally got annoyed enough to spend a weekend actually implementing the thing as a Django app. There. Done.

I got my ass handed to me by management for not going through the proper processes.

I learned something that day: I never want to work somewhere that engineers serve the processes and not the reverse. There are some that are good and necessary: like “thou shalt deploy via CD and not SSH into prod to edit code”. There are others that only exist to serve bureaucracy, and those try my patience.

[hansvm]

> thou shalt not live-edit prod

Even then, there's some nuance. During an outage, cowboy coding can get you back up and running much faster.

[kstrauser]

Yeah, depending on the particulars of a system. If you're at a startup and report to the CTO, that might be perfectly fine in an emergency. At a company with a few million users, almost certainly not. There's a spectrum of possibilities.

[hansvm]

In an emergency, that sort of thing even happens at Google (more for their smaller services, and almost always in the form of auto-LGTM hot-fixes bypassing the normal checks rather than actual live-editing of a script or binary, but even that latter thing happens occasionally). There are checks and controls, but an emergency for a billion users is a big deal.