Pro Tip: Perform Environmental Changes Now

In my current gig, like many development shops, we are responsible for maintaining our development environments. And like many development environments, the environments change.

Changes in environments are announced via email with accompanying instructions. That's nothing special.

My typical reaction to these instructions are to either do them right away if it is convenient or necessary, or mark the email for follow up and do them when it is convenient or necessary.

When I completely forget to make these changes and my environment is the only one that fails I always feel like a jerk if I end up wasting time trying to fix a completely preventable problem. I feel especially bad if I ask someone for help and end up wasting their time.

Going forward, I'm going to do both, perform the change immediately if possible and then mark the email in case a less proactive colleague should run into issues later in the day when he updates his build.