We soft-launched Nervous To-dos this week. If you missed it, it’s a Discord bot that turns your server into a GTD-style productivity system. Drop tasks in natural language, get them routed to projects, sync with Google Calendar, the whole deal. Yes I was also working on tick-d at the same time. I told you I had an addiction to to-do apps.

The launch went great. The bot was working. People were using it. I was feeling good.

For about six hours.

Murphy Enters The Chat

You know Murphy’s Law. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. I’ve shipped enough software to know this. I’ve lived this. And yet somehow, every single time, I am still surprised when the universe decides to remind me that it has a sense of humor.

We had adjusted how the bot creates roles for users. Simple change. Tested it locally. Looked good. Shipped it.

What we failed to confirm: the permission level those roles were being created at.

Ever faithful Brian—and I mean that, this man is a treasure—messages me to let me know something seems off with his permissions. A quick investigation revealed that yes, we had indeed been creating roles with… let’s call it “less than correct” access levels.

Not ideal.

The Fix

The good news: we caught it fast. The fix itself wasn’t complicated—just adjust the permission bits when creating the role. The bad news: rolling it out meant touching every affected user’s setup, which turned a five-minute code change into a much more involved afternoon.

Sarah, patron saint of launch day chaos, fed me corndogs while I worked through it. This is love.

The Lesson I Already Knew

Ship something, find the bug you missed. It’s not a matter of if, it’s when. All the local testing in the world won’t catch the thing you forgot to check because you didn’t think to check it.

The only real protection is good users who report issues quickly (thanks, Brian) and the willingness to drop everything and fix it when they do.

Nervous To-Dos is back to working correctly. The roles are appropriately permissioned. And I have been reminded, once again, that Murphy is undefeated.

Stay humble, ship anyway, and keep corndogs on hand.