Find an emergency developer for a production problem

Describe the symptom, not the cause

The most expensive mistake at this stage is self-diagnosis. People arrive convinced the database is corrupted when the real problem is an expired certificate, or convinced they have been hacked when a plugin update broke a template.

Guessing wrong sends the work to the wrong specialist, and you pay for hours spent looking in the wrong place. Say what you observe instead: what page, what error text, what you were doing when it started, and what changed recently.

What happens in the first hour

Production incidents follow a predictable order, and skipping steps in it is how a small outage turns into data loss. A competent engineer will stabilise before they investigate.

• Stop the bleeding — roll back the recent deployment or take the broken path out of the flow, so customers stop hitting the error.
• Isolate the cause from logs, error tracking and the last few commits, rather than from intuition.
• Fix it properly, with the change tested somewhere that is not production.
• Write down what happened and add whatever alarm would have caught it earlier.

Why the cheapest fix is often the worst one

When revenue is stopped, there is enormous pressure to accept whoever can start in ten minutes. That is usually how a temporary patch becomes permanent: the symptom disappears, the underlying fault stays, and it returns in a worse form during a busier week.

It is worth the extra hour to get someone who will tell you what actually failed. A written explanation of the root cause is the difference between having paid for a fix and having paid for a delay.

Before you hand over access

Whoever helps you will need credentials, and an outage is exactly when people hand over too much of them in a hurry. Give access to the specific system involved, not to everything, and revoke it when the work is finished.

If you cannot get into your own hosting, domain registrar or repository, say so up front. Recovering ownership is frequently the first job, and it changes how long everything else takes.

Choose the right next step

Use Fix when a live system is failing now and the first priority is to restore service. If the urgent problem is that the original developer is gone, Rescue is the better starting point. If you have a proposed repair or rewrite and need to test it before spending more, start with Review.