I want to share a mistake that turned into a valuable experience—so you don’t have to learn the hard way like I did.

April 11th.
The day I almost quit my career in software development.

I had built a Telegram WebApp for my first client. He was a cool guy—one of those rare people who believe in you more than you believe in yourself. The project grew steadily, and after eight months, it was thriving with nearly 20,000 daily active users.

Then... the crashes started.

The backend was hosted on AWS EC2, and like many beginners, I had everything—code, database, logs—all inside one instance. Classic.

I decided it was time to scale.

I dove into AWS docs, watched some tutorials, and told myself, "Yeah, I totally get how Auto Scaling works." (Spoiler: I didn’t.)

So, I created an Auto Scaling Group and added my beloved instance to it.

One minute later...
The Auto Scaling Group terminated my instance.

Everything. Gone.

I blacked out.
No joke—I actually passed out.
When I came to, I was dizzy, confused, and pretty sure I had just ended my career.

The WebApp had just told its users, “We’ll be back in an hour.” But now it felt like it might never come back. Ever.

I immediately reached out to AWS support.

They said:
No snapshot.
No backup.
No hope.

You might ask: “Bro, are you a vibe coder?”
Well, not really.
I knew about snapshots and backups—I just thought I’d never need them. I convinced myself that nothing would ever go wrong. And that was the dumbest smart move I ever made.

But here’s where the story turns...

I suddenly remembered:
I had done a full database backup the day before.

That was my golden ticket.

With shaky hands and newfound wisdom, I Spun up a new EC2 instance (with termination protection enabled, thank you very much),

Used RDS instead of self-hosting Postgres (never again!),

Pulled the repo,

Connected pgAdmin to the RDS instance,

Restored the backup.

And just like that, the app was back online.

Moral of the story?
Always—always—plan for failure.
Snapshots, backups, monitoring... don’t wait until disaster strikes.

Today, I’m smarter—not because I studied harder, but because I survived one of the worst days of my dev life. And I’m sharing this so that maybe, just maybe, you won’t have to go through the same thing.

Have you had a moment like this in your dev journey?
I’d love to hear your story—or even your advice for fellow developers learning the ropes.