There is a phrase in software development that triggers an immediate spike in blood pressure for any Lead Engineer. It usually comes from a Junior Developer, uttered with a mix of confusion and defensive innocence while the production server is actively crashing. The phrase is: “But… it works on my machine.”
This is the “Shrug of Doom.” It is the most dangerous sentence in the industry because it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what software actually is. The developer believes their job is to write logic that runs in a vacuum. In reality, their job is to ship a system that survives in the wild. When code runs perfectly in the sanitized bubble of a local environment but chokes the moment it touches the real world, the problem isn’t the server. The problem is that your development process is relying on luck rather than standardization.
The Folklore of “Ask Mike”
The root cause of the “It works on my machine” syndrome is rarely incompetence; it is almost always Information Silos.
In many teams, the setup process for a project is not a document; it is an oral tradition. A new developer joins, and they are told, “Oh, to get the database running, you have to ask Mike for the .env file, and remember that we are using a specific version of Node that isn’t listed in the package.json.”
This is “Tribal Knowledge,” and it is the enemy of scalability. When the instructions for deployment live in people’s heads or in lost Slack threads from six months ago, you are not building an engineering culture; you are building a cult. You are creating a dependency on specific individuals, meaning that if “Mike” goes on vacation, the deployment pipeline effectively breaks. The environment becomes a mystery, and every deployment becomes a roll of the dice.
Documentation is Infrastructure
To cure this, we must stop treating documentation as an afterthought—something we do “if we have time” after the sprint. Documentation is infrastructure.
A robust Knowledge Base—Wikis, READMEs, Deployment Guides—is the only way to bridge the gap between “Localhost” and “Production.”
- The Setup Guide: It should be so clear that a stranger could pull the repo and have it running in 15 minutes without speaking to a human.
- The Deployment Wiki: It must explicitly list every environment variable, every port configuration, and every dependency.
When you centralize this information in a dedicated Storage and Docs module, you eliminate the excuse. The “machine” stops being a unique snowflake and becomes a standardized container. The Junior Dev no longer has to guess; they have a map.
democratizing the Knowledge
The goal of a healthy development ecosystem is to make the “how” of the work accessible to everyone. When you move your guides and assets out of private folders and into a shared, accessible repository, you turn “Tribal Knowledge” into “Institutional Assets.”
This shift does more than just fix bugs; it empowers the team. It allows the Junior Dev to troubleshoot their own environment because the answers are right there. It turns the “deploy panic” into a boring, predictable checklist.
Stop relying on the “works on my machine” excuse. Standardize your development processes and centralize your technical documentation in the storage module of GGyess WorkSuite.
