Probably the most frustrating thing about being a developer is when business owners prioritise stuff they can see over anything that needs updating/maintenance but is not visible.

Take today. I’ve been asked to work on a bunch of Gravity Forms stuff that bugs users, which is fine. But that continues to put off the object caching with Redis project that has been on the block for 2 months. We continue to have to scramble to patch up and restart pods that are failing due to lack of caching.

We also have to update from MySQL 5.x which goes end of life at the end of the month. Oh and PHP 8.0 is end of life as well. But those projects aren’t visible so they continue to get pushed off in favour of stuff users can see.

The best way I’ve found to weather these types of storms is not to care about it. I continue to remind the business people that they have pulled me off Redis, PHP, MySQL stuff and document it in text. When things go down I link to the issues we have stopped and remind them that there is no real “fix” until we do the work.

Then at the end of the day when I’m off work I let them deal with the customer fallout.

Remember, it’s just a job. My kids won’t care if I’m a good programmer. They want me to make cookies with them like I did last night. I didn’t reboot sites, I let the business people do that on their time.

As is often the case, if it’s not painful to the people that pay you, it doesn’t get any action.