About a minute to the shelter, and coming back from reserve duty to a codebase that moved on

Two stories. Both true. Both about deploys, kind of.

One. In Haifa we have about a minute from the alert to the mamad, the safe room, sometimes less. I was in the middle of a rollout, kubectl rollout status running, new pods coming up. Alert. I grabbed the little one, my wife grabbed the big one, laptop stayed on the kitchen table. Ten minutes in the mamad, kids asking if the boom was close, me saying no with the face of a man who does not know. Came back, rollout was stuck. New pods failing readiness, because I forgot one config value before the alert. Rolled back, fixed it, rolled forward. The only thing that went fully to plan that evening was Kubernetes.

Two. I did long stretches of reserve duty in the last years. When I came back after the longest one, the team had moved on. Not their fault, life does not stop. But: the service I owned had moved from Spring WebFlux to Kotlin coroutines. Gradle went from Groovy to Kotlin DSL with version catalogs. There was a new feature flag system. Nobody had written down why any of it happened. I spent two weeks feeling like a junior in my own code, and nobody had time to explain because they were also covering for the other three people still in uniform.

What I learned from two:

• Write ADRs. Short ones. "We moved to coroutines because X, we considered Y". It is not for the people in the room, it is for the person who comes back.
• Keep a "while you were out" page for anyone returning from long leave. Parental leave, reserve duty, sickness, burnout. Same page.
• Pair the returning person on small tasks first. Not because they forgot how to code. Because they forgot how this team codes now.

And the rest, since this is the topic for it. For two years all I wanted was the hostages home and the war over. I am angry at Hamas, at Hezbollah, and at my own government, which I blame for October 7 and for a lot after it. And people in Gaza and in Lebanon are people, with kids who also ask if the boom was close. If this sentence makes you angry, from either side, ok. I am too tired to care.