When you have a customer that is a pain and you have to do a new contract since months but they are no replying but at same time there is a bug in a plugin they are using.
They are not updating their plugins in production but only after a test in staging.
In production there aren't write permission from web server side, so only they have access.
And the plugin has a 0-day.

A: our WordPress website that use heavily Facebook APIs is not working anymore because of the privacy changes
B (thinking): seems something easy, check the settings and do an invoice of the job for a portal that we didn't done and get a new customer
B: we can do it in blablabla for blablabla

Silence from the A side

1 month later...

A: I didn't found your bank account for the payment but we are ready to do that fix. And we have also a new feature request.

When your customer face a lot of 503 on the main website since weeks and you are confirming that the code changes doesn't affect anything for that.

Later in a 2 hour calls you see that the machine with the MySQL server (that wasn't monitored) had issues with table never optimized/repaired because the cron that do that was remove because useless (for them).

My standing desk (yes with a button became a standing desk) with a usb pedal that I scripted on Linux to move the mouse cursor.
There are also papers top of the monitor to help me to remember new hotkeys of Vim or other software.
My "clean" desk with a lot of fidgets that right now is quite clean.

Discover 2 days before go for a vacation week end that one of the customer servers will shutdown at midnight (the customer discuss and finally got other 2 days).
And that you to do a backup of 30gb of data before you leave and upload on the new server.
And in conclusion, as all the love stories, leave 2 day later that you didn't make in time because the original server is veeeeery slooooow.

How to manage updates on production as web agency

1: Update the GitHub private repo with your changes
2: Write an email to the customer sysadmin and ask to sync in staging and later production
3: Wait 2 weeks and do another ping about it
4: The sysadmin later will do that
5: In the meantime there is a security update of your CMS and a lot of plugins to update
6: Try to update from the CMS panel and there are no write permission
7: Cry a lot and write another email to go back to point 2

The cool feeling when you see your static analyzer that compare previous version and future release and code quality is improved.

At the same time the bad feeling because you was the same dev that made the previous version.

Customer complain about errors reported on their content on their website.
Checking their content in WordPress and they was adding a script to include jQuery and another js with html tags.

So trying to understand why jQuery is required and on a 100 lines js vanilla, was used on line 3 to get an attribute of an element.

And they was breaking a site for this.

When you receive a support request for a your product that extend another product.

After few emails you get the access on the website and you discover that is using an old version of the software that you extend and that your support is crappy on that.

Never forget to ask before everything the version of stuff to save time.
Also don't hesitate to give a reimburse for this case or suggest for an update so you can sleep better and maybe ADD AN ALERT FOR THE OLD VERSION THAT YOU FORGOT TO DO on your release.

When you are discussing about a customer issue with a service that you are using for offer your product and to understand the issue you ask a screenshot.

Later you receive the screenshot in Dutch (we are Italians) and is quite impossible to understand.
Few seconds later you remember that Google Translate for Android support the text recognition and save the day.

I appreciated a lot the Google's service quality also if I block all their trackers.

Development of 1 year where you send to the customers the files edited or the full package to upload in their servers.
After an year you discover that they was doing patches of your code, fine but I need that. They sent to you that patches to be in sync.
After 1.4 years you discover that they have their own git unused and they want that we use that because they are bored to do manual patches.

Useless to say that we discovered that they was doing patches only when the system gone on production?