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Rollback Principle
Table of Contents
Rollback principle = know how to restore the last good state before you push - and when the new state breaks, revert first, debug second.
If I can't explain the path back in one sentence, I'm not ready to ship. Reversibility is the decision frame; rollback is the rehearsed move. Last quarter I kept a bad Friday deploy live because I wanted the milestone more than the rollback conversation - the team needed “my call, here's the fix,” not a speech.
Examples
- Bad Friday deploy - I reverted in standup, said my call, fixed Monday. Users got the old build before lunch; postmortem waited until the site was calm.
- The restaurant tried a new sauce but kept the old batch in the warmer until the first table cleared their plates - rollback was ladles, not a meeting.
- We tried a stricter screen-time rule and left the old routine on the fridge for a week - Tuesday meltdowns meant revert that night, not “give it two more weeks.”
- The point guard ran Tuesday's inbound at halftime when the new play bled points - rollback was the drill they'd already walked, not a whiteboard invention.
Note Relationships
| Relationship | Wikilink | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| alternative | Failure as Feedback | Rollback is move first; root-cause learning comes after the site is calm |
| contradicts | Ship It | when milestone pride blocks calling rollback Friday night |
| contradicts | Sunk Cost Fallacy | when “we already deployed” blocks undoing a bad release |
| extends | Build a Reliable Default | Rehearsed rollback is the default when deploys go loud |
| extends | Own the Error | Revert fast, name it in the standup, fix after calm returns |
| extends | Preparedness | Practice the undo path before the alarm owns the clock |
| extends | Reversibility | Concrete undo path - not only “prefer reversible choices” |
| extends | Risk Management | Named rollback is a control layer before irreversible harm |
| extends | Standard Operating Procedures | Rollback steps belong in the runbook, not in someone's head |
| implements | Free Tier Hosting Stack | Git revert and previous Cloudflare deploy are the rollback lane |
