Draft: Force Pushed to Main

Day: Thursday — Story Day
Format: Micro Case Study
Status: Draft

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I force pushed to main on my internal docs repo last week and wiped out an entire session of work I'd committed from my phone.

20+ years of experience. Solo repo. "It's fine, I'm the only one working in here." Classic.

The fix took 30 seconds. One branch protection rule. That's it. The kind of thing I tell clients to set up on day one, and I hadn't done it on my own repo because "I'll do it later." Later means never.

The funniest part is I was literally building tools to improve my own workflow and then nuked the workflow in the same session.

This is the thing about guardrails. Knowing better and having them are two completely different problems. You don't skip the seatbelt just because you're a good driver. The best software and infrastructure engineers aren't the ones who never make mistakes. They're the ones who make it structurally harder to repeat them.

Go set up your branch protection rules. Yes, even on your solo repos. Yes, even if you've been doing this for 20 years.

#SoftwareEngineering #DevOps #SRE #CareerGrowth