Yesterday I was really cranking.

The day started slowly; I was distracted by the SOPA stuff and couldn’t seem to get into a groove.

And then things started popping for a few hours–finished authentication and sessions and started testing to see where things stood.

There was a bug. One of the modules has a number of dependencies, and something had destabilized it. So I started chasing it down.

(For you hackers out there, the evil module is JSDOM, which has dependencies on HTMLParser and Contextify)
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I made a mistake, as I occasionally do: I see something over at Stack about upgrading, so I upgraded to the latest stable version of Node and NPM.

And that’s when it started.

4 hours later, I got everything working again–except for JSDOM. I’m no closer than I was do fixing the issue, and wasted 4 hours I’ll never get back.

I try to avoid unnecessary downtime. Configuration issues take a lot of time and energy and can suck the life out of you.

What causes your downtime? How do you avoid it? I keep touching that hot stove…