Testing is what lets you sleep at night
“If you want reliable database deployments, you need confidence in what you’re releasing and that comes from testing, standards, and slowing down to do things right.”
Adam Hafner, Senior Database Engineer at Interstates
In a high-pressure manufacturing environment, deployment mistakes are costly. Adam Hafner ‘s team ship changes to software that controls “machines the size of fridges and conveyor belts as long as football fields“. If a deployment disrupts a production line, it costs the company thousands of dollars a minute, and it leads to long, stressful nights under intense scrutiny from managers and clients. “You’re on the hook to fix it fast“, he says, “and you’ve got 50 people waiting on you.”
Adam’s answer hasn’t just been better automation to cut out manual errors, but a shift in development mindset: Go slow to go fast. Delivering quickly isn’t real productivity if someone else is left frantically trying to debug your rushed code at 3AM, before the production line restarts. Or has to explain to a client why a bug they thought was fixed has suddenly reappeared, because the fix was accidentally overwritten.
Adam sees the introduction of database unit tests as the biggest shift.
Tests don’t just catch bugs early. They change how developers think. You stop just ticking off tasks and start thinking about edge cases, what could go wrong, what you didn’t consider.
Testing, he says, is what lets you sleep at night.
He’s also introduced standards, not just for how the team writes code, though it’s a lifesaver at 3 a.m. when you’re trying to debug, but for how changes are communicated. They now log every change: what it is, why it happened, which tickets it relates to. That shared awareness has made a huge difference.
We used to move fast and break things. Now we’re more deliberate. That mindset shift makes everything you deliver more reliable, and deployments much less stressful.
To truly switch off, Adam goes fly-fishing in the remote streams of South Dakota. With no phone signal, no messages, he finds the space to decompress in an environment far removed from the high-pressure deployment window. “It’s just you, the river, and a rod,” he says. “That kind of stillness helps reset everything.”
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