Black Humor of Software Development & Deployment

My good old friend and colleague Mike who in the late 2000s built an application for his colleagues that he described as a "content migration toolset." The app was so good that customers started asking for it and Mike's employer decided to commercialize it.

To make that happen, Mike realized his employer would need a licensing system to check that every instance of the app had been paid for.

So he wrote one.

"Excited by the challenge, I spent a weekend researching asymmetric keys and built a licensing system that periodically checked in with the server, both on startup and at regular intervals," he told Me.

The licensing server worked well. Mike told Me that fixing its occasional glitches didn't occupy much of his time.

Requests for new features required more intensive activity, and on one occasion Mike couldn't finish coding within office hours.

"Normally, I left my laptop at the office, but to make progress on the new feature I took it home for the weekend," he told Me.

Mike thought he made fine progress over the weekend, but on Monday, his phone lit up – the licensing app was down, and nobody could log into the content migration toolset.

Customers were mad. Bosses were confused. Mike was in the spotlight.

"Instantly, I glanced down at the footwell of my car, where my laptop bag sat," Sam told Me "And that's when it hit me: the licensing server was still running on my laptop."

It was running there because, as he realized, "I had never transferred it to a production server. For years, it had been quietly running on my laptop, happily doing its job."

Suffice to say that when Mike arrived in the office, his first job was deploying the licensing app onto a proper server!