The Release Almost Failed—Here’s How I Saved It From an RV Park

A Quiet Morning Turns Urgent

It was early August in 2023. I had been climbing the incredible conglomerate walls of Maple Canyon, Utah. My chalk-covered pants were on their fourth straight day of wear and begging to be washed. Forearms were sore and fingertips were tinder but I was feeling recharged and grounded. That balance—pushing myself outdoors before dialing into calls—was exactly why I had spent so much time convincing my team in Austin to let me work from the road just a few weeks before.

My climbing partner and I had checked into the Wind Walker Homestead RV Park the night before to enjoy some creature comforts before he headed out but the minute I opened my laptop on Tuesday morning reality hit: our team was just days away from a major release, and a serious problem had surfaced.

A “Simple Fix” Gone Wrong

My team had been hard at work for the past 2 years building a virtual ultrasound machine which enabled sonographers and doctors to review ultrasound scans remotely. We had piloted it to our first customers and were getting ready to drop some exciting new features. This included support for multiple viewers on a single page which allowed users to compare measurements and annotations without navigating between pages. A newer frontend developer on our team had been tasked with implementing this feature and after weeks of work, her solution looked solid—until I dug into a critical bug that she had been telling me was going to be a simple fix.

What I found was worse than expected: a foundational flaw meant the code had to be completely rewritten. We couldn’t patch it. And we couldn’t miss the release.

Tech Time

The frontend was powered by Angular. She had created an observable pattern between a directive and a service which wasn’t triggering when it needed to. In addition to that, it went against the design patterns and architecture we had used up to that point. There was no modifying it. The whole solution had to be scrapped with the exception of a few useful snippets of code.

As lead developer, I wasn’t about to let this slip. Not only had I just been given this trial run of working from my van but our biggest client had been waiting on this release to assess the product’s viability in their clinic.

Crunchtime

I called my CTO to give him a heads up. He was a great boss to have. The kind that would be right down there in the trenches with you. The kind who would never throw you under the bus. He would have taken the bullet on this one but the truth was I should have been more diligent with this newer developer. She told me she could handle it and I left her to it. I erred on the side of avoiding conflict. It was a lesson I learned that day and still keep with me today. Now, we were in the eleventh hour and I was the only one who could refactor this in time. There wasn’t a line of code that I hadn’t written or reviewed so I knew exactly what needed to be done.

First, I talked to the owner of the RV park about staying an extra night. I was out of cash, but he told me I could pay later. That kind of kindness—grace from strangers—is part of what keeps me on the road.

Then I cracked an energy drink, sat down in my van, and locked in.

For the next 10 hours, my world shrank to my keyboard. Food breaks were frantic shovels of calories. I only took bathroom breaks when my bladder was on the verge of bursting. It felt like being back at a hackathon: bloodshot eyes, adrenaline-fueled typing, and that strange mix of exhaustion and flow.

By sunset, I pushed the final commit. Testing passed. The release was back on track.

From Disaster to Blueprint

The refactor didn’t just get the release out the door—it became the template for future services in our app. What started as a disaster turned into one of my proudest contributions to the codebase.

And I did it all from my van looking out at the San Pitch Mountains, powered by trust, determination, and a stubborn refusal to let circumstances limit what’s possible.

Limits Are Just Logistics

That day is a reminder why I insist to live this way. Remote work isn’t always glamorous—it can mean coding under pressure in unexpected places. But it’s also freedom. The freedom to climb world-class routes one day and ship production code the next.

Living in a van doesn’t mean doing less. It means refusing to put limits on where great work can happen.