Spring GDS 25th Anniversary
A logistics company that ships to 190 countries built something to ship to itself.
Hotfix
What is a hotfix?
A hotfix is an urgent patch applied directly to a production system to resolve a critical bug or security vulnerability, without waiting for the next scheduled release. Regular updates move through the full development and testing pipeline. A hotfix skips ahead, because something is broken right now and users are feeling it.
Hotfixes come from problems that cannot wait. A payment flow that stops taking money. A security hole that is actively being exploited. Data getting corrupted. A crash hitting a large slice of your users. When a checkout button silently fails on a Friday afternoon and orders stop landing, the urgency justifies a faster, more direct path to deployment. In Git-based workflows, a hotfix usually lives on a dedicated branch cut from the production branch rather than from development. Once verified, it merges back into both, so the fix survives the next release and does not quietly disappear.
A hotfix is a tool, not a habit. Issuing them constantly is a signal, and the signal points at the testing and release process upstream. Teams that reach for hotfixes week after week usually have gaps in QA or pre-production validation that are worth fixing at the root.
Hotfixes at Dallonses
When something breaks in a client's production environment, the clock is real and so is the pressure. We treat that moment as a shared problem. Our team isolates the failure, ships the smallest safe fix, and gets it live, then circles back to merge it cleanly so it holds in the next release. No drama, no finger-pointing. The product is back up and the client knows exactly what happened and why.
After the fire is out, we ask the harder question: why did this reach production at all? That is where the real work happens. We tighten the tests, close the gap that let the bug through, and adjust the release process so the same class of problem does not come back. Hotfixes will always exist. The goal is to need them less often, and we build toward that with every client we work with.
Something broken in production and the clock is ticking? Let's get it back up.
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