The Friday curse is a sign you need to step up your game.

In darkest coding rooms in the dead of night, there are whispers of the most taboo of taboos... the Friday deployment. Never deploy on a Friday, wisdom says, because here be dragons and even small changes will break production and whole weekends will be lost!

Drama aside, Friday-phobia is a real, documented thing, and some IT companies even have a fast rule to never deploy on Friday.

Here's why I think teams fear Friday deployments:
👉 Weak or missing CI/CD pipelines
👉 No feature flags or rollback strategies
👉 Slow, manual QA cycles
👉 Teams that don’t trust their pipeline
👉 <Insert catchy quote about work-life balance here>, pick your favorite.

Fear of Friday deployment isn’t really about Friday, it’s about fragile pipelines or fragile systems. Fear is just a symptom. Broken processes are the disease. I won't tell you to start doing Friday deployment, but I would like to give you a slightly different perspective. If your process can keep bad code out and raise red flags instantly, Friday becomes just another day.

What can you do to lessen this fear?
✅ Make deployment boring. Deployments should be small, safe, and reversible
✅ Rely on strong CI/CD, tests, and automation
✅ Invest in monitoring
✅ Have a rollback plan and test that it works!
✅ Make sure your database migrations are reversible and test them both ways
✅ Test on a staging system before production, bonus points if you have monitoring and error logging on staging systems

If you trust your deployment, you can release any day, any time. If you don’t, the problem isn’t the calendar, it’s the process. That said, I am still not advocating for Friday deployments, because sometimes weird bugs do occur, and it's better to deal with them on Monday rather than Saturday at 1 am, but hopefully we can lessen the fear around Friday deployment just a little... except if it's Friday the 13th. Never deploy on Friday the 13th.