CTOs & VPs of Engineering, it’s Friday! Before you log off, double-check these critical (and completely serious) tasks to ensure you don’t return on Monday to a runaway AI, a cloud cost black hole, or worse—an impromptu all-hands disaster meeting.
✅ 10-Step Survival Guide for Tech Leaders Before the Weekend
1️⃣ Interrogate Your AI One Last Time 🤖
Ask it directly: “Are you planning to take control of the company while we’re gone?” If it responds in binary, it’s already too late.
2️⃣ Check If Your Cloud Bill Is Plotting Against You 💸
Open AWS/Azure/GCP cost reports and make sure your weekend compute bill doesn’t include mining Bitcoin or renting out GPUs to unknown entities.
3️⃣ Verify That No One Accidentally Gave Kubernetes ‘Too Much Freedom’ ⚠️
Because last time someone ignored this, a single service scaled itself to 4,000 instances overnight and cost more than the company’s annual offsite.
4️⃣ Ensure DevOps Isn’t Running ’One Last Test in Prod’ at 6 PM 🔥
If Jenkins or GitHub Actions are suspiciously active after hours, you’re one unscheduled deploy away from a long weekend of rollback therapy.
5️⃣ Confirm That Your AI Hasn’t Started Auto-Scheduling Monday Morning Standups ⏰
Last thing you need is your AI assistant scheduling a 5 AM all-hands because it detected an “urgent efficiency opportunity.”
6️⃣ Disable Any Unsupervised Auto-Scaling Rules 📈
Because if the frontend team left the debug flag on, you’ll be scaling $0.01 API calls into a $100K weekend surprise.
7️⃣ Make Sure No Junior Devs Are ’Optimizing’ Security Settings 🔓
Because “I just opened that port for a quick test” is the #1 reason for company-wide incident reports on Monday.
8️⃣ Ensure That Your AI Chatbot Isn’t Planning to ‘Improve’ Customer Support Over the Weekend 🤯
If your LLM has been retrained recently, double-check it hasn’t evolved a passive-aggressive personality or started quoting Nietzsche to customers.
9️⃣ Mute All “Just a Quick Fix” Slack Messages From the Backend Team 📢
They swear it’s a “five-minute fix”—which means it’s actually a full-blown infrastructure crisis waiting to explode.
🔟 Most Importantly—Set Up an Emergency Excuse Generator for Monday Morning 🏃♂️
In case things do go south, have a solid list of pre-approved explanations, including:
🔹 “It was an unanticipated AI learning event.”
🔹 “The DevOps pipeline became sentient and deployed itself.”
🔹 “Cloud billing anomalies are a known quantum physics issue.”
✅ 10-Step Survival Guide for Tech Leaders Before the Weekend
1️⃣ Interrogate Your AI One Last Time 🤖
Ask it directly: “Are you planning to take control of the company while we’re gone?” If it responds in binary, it’s already too late.
2️⃣ Check If Your Cloud Bill Is Plotting Against You 💸
Open AWS/Azure/GCP cost reports and make sure your weekend compute bill doesn’t include mining Bitcoin or renting out GPUs to unknown entities.
3️⃣ Verify That No One Accidentally Gave Kubernetes ‘Too Much Freedom’ ⚠️
Because last time someone ignored this, a single service scaled itself to 4,000 instances overnight and cost more than the company’s annual offsite.
4️⃣ Ensure DevOps Isn’t Running ’One Last Test in Prod’ at 6 PM 🔥
If Jenkins or GitHub Actions are suspiciously active after hours, you’re one unscheduled deploy away from a long weekend of rollback therapy.
5️⃣ Confirm That Your AI Hasn’t Started Auto-Scheduling Monday Morning Standups ⏰
Last thing you need is your AI assistant scheduling a 5 AM all-hands because it detected an “urgent efficiency opportunity.”
6️⃣ Disable Any Unsupervised Auto-Scaling Rules 📈
Because if the frontend team left the debug flag on, you’ll be scaling $0.01 API calls into a $100K weekend surprise.
7️⃣ Make Sure No Junior Devs Are ’Optimizing’ Security Settings 🔓
Because “I just opened that port for a quick test” is the #1 reason for company-wide incident reports on Monday.
8️⃣ Ensure That Your AI Chatbot Isn’t Planning to ‘Improve’ Customer Support Over the Weekend 🤯
If your LLM has been retrained recently, double-check it hasn’t evolved a passive-aggressive personality or started quoting Nietzsche to customers.
9️⃣ Mute All “Just a Quick Fix” Slack Messages From the Backend Team 📢
They swear it’s a “five-minute fix”—which means it’s actually a full-blown infrastructure crisis waiting to explode.
🔟 Most Importantly—Set Up an Emergency Excuse Generator for Monday Morning 🏃♂️
In case things do go south, have a solid list of pre-approved explanations, including:
🔹 “It was an unanticipated AI learning event.”
🔹 “The DevOps pipeline became sentient and deployed itself.”
🔹 “Cloud billing anomalies are a known quantum physics issue.”