do you do any rituals to make it psychologically easier to deploy your code into production / replace an existing working system?

Purely psychological stuff, as opposed to practical things to make sure it doesn't break?

Not really.

Unless IIS is involved somehow, in which case I'll probably sacrifice a goat at a crossroads because I've tried everything else.

Only on Fridays. Official deploy day.

1: don't suck at your job

2: just click "deploy"

3: ???

4: profit

@donkulator in case of IIS, just expect everything to fail in the most terrible way possible.

that way, you only get surprised negatively _sometimes_

Open a beer and go into zero fucks given mode

That's where tests are for - peace of mind. Write those. Integration above unit

Tell myself it's easy and fast to roll back, just do it.

@retoor If all the tests are passing, that can only mean one thing: you've forgotten to write tests for all the stuff that's broken.

@donkulator kinda yes - but you should also check with coverage if every line is hit after running tests. I recently had a coverage of 99.7% and that last not hit 0.3% was a bug indeed. Coverage is amazing stuff. So underrated. It's the only way to know if your tests have the right reach

Yes, TDD and CICD