The push notification came at 2:17 AM.

“Prod is down.”

That’s how my Tuesday technically started.

Working as a developer in a Silicon Valley startup means you’re never fully “off.” You might close your laptop at midnight thinking a feature shipped cleanly, only to wake up to Slack lighting up like a Christmas tree. Production bugs don’t care about time zones. Investors don’t care either.

By 2:25, I was at my desk, hoodie on, screen glowing in a dark apartment. Our product handles real-time transactions, so every minute down feels expensive. Messages flying in: “Seeing 500 errors.” “Database latency spiking.” “Anyone touched auth service?”

In a big company, maybe there’s a playbook. In a startup, you are the playbook.

Turns out a small change — a “minor optimization” — triggered a memory issue under heavy load. It passed testing. It even passed staging. But real users? Different story. That’s the thing about scale. It humbles you.

We jumped on a quick call. No blame. Just focus. Rollback plan ready. Logs open. Monitoring dashboards refreshed every few seconds. There’s something intense but strangely bonding about debugging live with your team while the world sleeps.

At 3:08 AM, we rolled back the release.

At 3:11 AM, traffic stabilized.

At 3:14 AM, someone typed: “We’re back.”

No applause. No dramatic celebration. Just quiet relief and a few exhausted thumbs-up emojis.

The next morning, we still had stand-up at 9.

That’s startup life. You move fast because you have to. You break things sometimes because you’re building things that didn’t exist before. Titles don’t protect you. As a developer here, you’re not just writing code — you’re shaping product decisions, jumping into customer calls, sometimes even explaining outages to non-technical stakeholders.

It’s messy. It’s high-pressure. It’s unpredictable.

But when you see users relying on something you built — when a feature goes live and actually works at scale — it feels worth it.

Even at 2:17 AM.