Estimated reading time: ~6 minutes. No prior experience required. The Friday deploy that ruined a weekend There was a ritual I do not miss: the manual deploy. Someone would pull the latest code onto a server by hand, run a few commands from memory, cross their fingers, and hope. One Friday, a teammate forgot a single step. The code went live with a broken setting, nobody ran the tests first, and we spent Saturday untangling it. The lesson wasn't "be more careful." Humans...