What A Day Off Taught Me About Being a Lead Dev
It started as a day off.
I had my personal laptop, a plan for personal projects, and a seat at my favorite place in Montreal. BAnQ, the big public library. Coffee in hand. Ready to build.
By 9am I was already checking Teams.
We had done a release the day before. A bug fix plus a small background color change across a few pages. A marketing request, passed QA, looked great to me. I even remember thinking the old background was ugly. Easy win.
Except in the evening, after the release, a manager flagged that the new colors caused visibility issues. I flagged my PM and went offline. Day off started.
Except it didn’t really start.
I watched from my phone as the team confirmed the issue was ours. The PM flagged that the ticket needed a design pass. We have a designer on the team, we should have looped them in. Then the conversation escalated. Directors got involved. One said it needed a rollback. And then the real problem surfaced: nobody on my team knew how to do a release without me. No backup, no documentation, no one with the access and confidence to just do it.
Two mistakes in one release. On my day off. With my team scrambling.
I felt awful. Probably the worst I’ve felt in years at work.
Here’s what I’ve been learning in lead training: leads who also code (which is what we are at my company) need to switch hats constantly. Dev hat, lead hat, back and forth. This sprint I dropped my lead hat in two specific ways.
The first: my PM had already flagged that we needed a backup releaser on the team. Someone who could step in when I’m not around. I agreed. I had a whole plan. Documentation, a live release session with a dev, making sure someone felt comfortable. It was on my list. It just wasn’t prioritized. And today showed exactly why it should have been.
The second: I have a strict pre-release habit of reviewing every ticket. Checking the code, reading the comments, looking for red flags. I did that review. I saw the background color change. I saw the screenshots. It looked good to me. But I didn’t go deeper. Didn’t ask if visibility had been checked across different contexts. Didn’t flag it for a design pass. I was probably more in dev mode than lead mode, and it slipped through.
I let the team down in two ways on the same release. I’m owning that.
The harder thing I’m sitting with is this: I have a strong instinct to protect my team. I like knowing people feel safe, confident, not stressed. I tend to be the one who absorbs pressure so others don’t have to. And I’ve been learning that this instinct, while it comes from a real place, can get in the way.
Not every uncomfortable moment should be shielded away. Some of them are where the growth lives. For the team, and for me. Today was uncomfortable. Today was also real growth. one developer of the team stepped up and did the deploy without me. The team figured it out. That matters more than the fact that it was stressful.
I also noticed something more personal today, sitting with all of this: part of why incidents like this hit me so hard is ego. Not in a bad way, but in an honest way. I want to do right. I want to be good. I don’t want to let people down because I genuinely care about them, but also because I care about how I show up. That’s worth knowing about yourself.
By the time I fully put the phone down it was almost noon. Three hours of a day off spent in my own head at a library table.
But then something shifted. I wrote it all down. I talked it through. I drafted a note to my team. I wrote something personal to one developer of the team, who did the deploy. I mapped out my retro talking points. And somewhere in that process the weight got lighter. Not because the situation changed, but because I’d processed it properly.
And then, almost by accident, I started planning a blog.
I used to have a blog in high school. Back when the internet was personal. When people just wrote about their lives and other people read it because they felt a little less alone. I’ve been thinking about starting one again for a while. A place to write about being a lead dev who still codes, who’s building personal projects on the side, who’s figuring it out in public.
Today felt like the right first post. Not because it’s a great story, but because it’s a true one.
I’m Sam. I’m in progress.