I was working on a trading system at a bank that didn't have automated deployments so we relied on the Ops team to manually release code to production on our be

I was working on a trading system at a bank that didn't have automated deployments so we relied on the Ops team to manually release code to production on our behalf. Release plans had to be documented in MS Word with step-by-step instructions that the Ops team would literally copy and paste into a terminal. It was the worst kind of Sarbanes-Oxley separation of duties theatre. This system was built in Java and was launched using a simple shell script that used a `for` loop to build the classpath by looping over all the JARs in the lib folder and appending them to a shell variable. With the release "process" in mind, hotfixes and patches had to be kept as simple as possible. To release a hotfix we would JAR up the one or two classes that needed to be patched and into a single JAR file, then modify the startup script to pre-pend that JAR file to the classpath so that the patched classes were found first, taking advantage of Java's classpath loading algorithm.