This is the story of how a web development company was really excited to launch an updated version of its own website, and it went wrong in just about the worst way possible.

So I was watching this torrent of matrix-like text just roll across my screen, thinking about rocketlift.com because we’re working on rocketlift.com, and my eyes caught emyth.com in there, and my brain went, “Oh, that’s wrong. That’s not the site that we’re working on right now! Something is terribly amiss.”

– Matt Pearson

Spoiler alert: this is the story of the Rocket Lift’s very first makeover to it’s own website, and the debacle that followed. That’s right. This is a story about us, and how we accidentally deployed code onto our client’s server.

Matt Pearson is an avid supporter of open source, open data, open standards, and the indie-web. He also has something of an obsession with information security and the tension between publicness and privacy in our ever more interconnected world. Matt manages Rocket Lift’s server hosting infrastructure — the hard work you typically won’t see — and he consults with our clients on information architecture and critical systems for information security, backups, and off-site redundancy. Before co-founding Rocket Lift, Matt spent seven years in IT at Whitman College. Matt lives in beautiful Seattle, where he and his wife are owned by a couple of cats.

For endless hilarity, follow Matt Pearson on Twitter: @matro_wtf.

Jed Bickford is Director of Product Development at EMyth. His team is focused on building simple tools that use the EMyth Point of View to enable business owners to create stability, growth, and freedom through their work with EMyth Coaches. He’s an entrepreneur at heart and lives in Ashland, Oregon.

Follow Jed on Twitter: @jedbickford.

Bryan Teoh is a composer, instrumentalist, and new media artist working out of Brooklyn, NY. His work often explores the relationship between acoustic/synthetic soundscapes, composition/improvisation, and popular/academic music utilizing custom software as well as instrumental work on the viola da gamba, cello, guitar, and piano. He holds a degree in theory/composition from The Lawrence Conservatory of Music where his studies of jazz and classical music were intermittently interrupted to independently venture into electronic music and contemporary studio technique. When not wading into increasingly esoteric areas of musical ephemera, Bryan en