There’s a special kind of panic that comes when you realize you might have just broken something that really matters.

Mine started with one small file — a cryptographic key used to publish a client’s Android apps on the Play Store.

We were hours away from handing everything back after years of collaboration with a major client. The transition needed to be clean and professional.

And then I couldn’t find the key.

See, a few years earlier I had made what I thought was the responsible choice: I only made one copy of the key and kept it safe. For privacy reasons, you just don’t save sensitive keys in a version-control repo.

Except “safe” turned out to mean “somewhere only past-me knew about.”

When I went looking, the old Skype message where I’d sent it had expired. No one else had downloaded it. My backups weren’t old enough since I migrated computers. My old computer — the one that might still have it — was sitting back home in the UK, boxed up to be sold.

That was a very long couple of hours.

Without that key, the client wouldn’t have been able to update their apps. Even Google couldn’t help. They would have had to start again with new listings — losing users, ratings, and visibility. Not exactly the graceful hand-off we’d promised. 😬

Luckily, my brother found a copy buried deep in an old project folder. He sent it over, and the crisis passed. But I never forgot that moment.

It taught me something I still live by:

Automation isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about creating safety nets for your future self — versions, backups, and checks that quietly save the day when human memory doesn’t.

We love to think automation makes things faster and easier. But the best automation doesn’t just save time — it saves you when things go wrong.

That’s the real magic of automation — it lets you sleep at night.

So if you don’t have simple reminders or systems to make sure your “keys” are (literal or metaphorical), maybe it’s time to build that into your setup.

Andrew "oops didn't mean to do that" Molloy

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