Decades ago, when Mathew Thomas was a young programmer for a pager company, he learned a valuable lesson that many veteran coders have likely learned, too:

If the weekend is almost here, don’t touch anything.

“If you really want to anger the gods of software, deploy new software on a Friday afternoon,” Thomas, now SVP of engineering at KnowBe4, told us, recalling how a well-meaning colleague at the time who’d wanted to optimize a database by changing indexes, but did not change all of the code that uses the indexes.

Software at that pager company connected a customer relationship management (CRM) network to a network of pagers. The changes accidentally took down the CRM system, Thomas said, and there was the risk that two million customers could not manage their devices.

“It was what we call a potential extinction-level event. I mean, it was that type of bug,” he told us, remembering working the weekend to solve the problem.

Veteran coders like Thomas spoke with us about the coding bugs that can ruin a Friday or a whole weekend—and what mechanisms (like emergency rollbacks) should be in place before everyone heads to happy hour.

Why weekend work can wait.—BH

New enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, who dis?

Last year, Ulta Beauty concluded one of the largest IT initiatives in its history as it migrated its core business functions from its outdated ERP system to SAP S/4HANA.

Mike Maresca, Ulta’s chief technology and transformation officer, told IT Brew that the company made the decision to “rethink” its core systems after observing how omnichannel shopping, a strategy that unifies the shopping experience for consumers across various mediums, changed consumer behaviors and expectations.

“It was about aligning the technology with our overall vision at Ulta and that was really to be the destination and meet our guests where they’re at, whether it be online or in our stores,” Maresca, who joined Ulta in 2023, said.

To the salon! Ulta’s IT modernization journey, known internally as Project Strength, Optimize, Accelerate, and Renew (SOAR), kicked off in April 2021. The first phase of the project homed in on upgrading the company’s corporate functions. The next two portions of the transition focused on modernizing Ulta’s supply chain and “deploying inventory capabilities.” Together, the transformation allowed the beauty retailer to roll out a new inventory management platform to its stores, allowing Ulta associates to look up products and check inventory more efficiently and automate processes such as invoice matching.

Keeping up with trends isn’t just stylish.—BM

The Biden administration issued two sweeping directives addressing cybersecurity needs for the federal government, including one that materialized just days before President Donald Trump took office. The current president did not rescind the cybersecurity executive orders (EOs) the way he did others.

Now, in the midst of cybersecurity concerns resulting from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), along with productivity and waste-reducing directives from the Trump administration, it’s unclear whether or not the EOs are still a priority for the federal government.

Well, this is what it looks like. The Trump administration’s new EOs focus heavily on government efficiency and direct agencies to only work on statutorily required activities, which could override tasks from previous directives.

“Until middle of [April], a lot of interagency work was blocked,” one IT professional in the federal government wrote to IT Brew. “This all caused a lot of work stoppage on those EOs, especially anything that required multi-agency collaboration. Folks aren’t really working on the last couple Biden EOs on cyber for example, they just went ‘poof.’”

The Department of State continuously receives guidance on cybersecurity objectives from the Trump administration.

What will cybersecurity regulations look like now?—CN