In my first year as an engineer, I shut off the production application server. It was an internally-developed app server built in & for an internally-developed

In my first year as an engineer, I shut off the production application server. It was an internally-developed app server built in & for an internally-developed language, with its own internally-developed persistence mechanism, and it was my first day working with it. I had several terminals open, and in one I'd logged on to production to check how the data was formatted, so I could get something comparable for my dev environment. Unfortunately I forgot to log off, and at some point I issued the `stop server` command, thinking I was doing it on dev. A few minutes later the project leader, one of the most senior engineers, came over and started yelling at me. Fortunately not much was lost (other than a few users' sessions--not a high-traffic site). But I was really appalled at my mistake and I certainly wondered if I was about to be fired. Since then I've taken steps to (1) keep myself off production as much as possible (2) make a production terminal visually distinct from a non-production one. As a sometime project leader myself now, I also make sure newcomers can easily obtain an adequate development environment, and I don't give out the production login to every junior dev. :-)