How a conference talk, a hardcoded branch, and too many deployment requests led me to ephemeral environments.

Remember how it started?

I was at a conference, volunteering.

Someone said "ephemeral," and I got hooked.

Remember when I fell in love?

I do.

April. NDC Sydney.

I wasn't on stage, or even there as a regular attendee.

I was volunteering.

And somewhere in between, I ended up in a talk called:

"Ephemeral Environments: Easier Said Than Spun"

And I fell for it.

Not a person.

An idea that could kill the most annoying sentence in my job.

To explain why it hit so hard, I need to go back a bit.

Before we met

For a long time, my favourite word at work was:

"Not now."

Not because I didn't want to help.

Because I was the only one who could do it.

Our pipeline was simple.

Build.

Deploy.

That's it.

Two stages, and only for the branches that mattered. develop went to dev.…