The Context: April 2026

I currently serve as a Fractional CTO for a mid-sized, specialized distribution company here in Australia. Recently, the business experienced a perfect storm: high staff turnover, a slew of new product launches, and several messy third-party system integrations.

As a result, the local entropy of our core systems spiked. Operational errors began creeping into order approvals, warehouse dispatch logs, and customer permission configurations.

Instead of focusing on high-level architectural shifts, I found myself constantly pulled into the weeds, playing the role of a makeshift DBA to put out fires.

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The Grind

The procedural loop was numbingly predictable:

1. Receive a frantic email from operations.
2. Analyze the context and mentally map it to the underlying database tables.
3. Write a data-correction script.
4. Test in the sandbox environment.
5. Backup the production tables.
6. Execute the script in production.
7. Verify via the UI.
8. Reply to the email confirming the fix.

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A few times a month, this is harmless. But lately, this exact sequence was happening multiple times a day. The sheer repetition wasn't technically difficult, but it was violently disrupting my state of deep work.