I’m working on expanding the AI Shipping Labs website and wanted to migrate its current version from static GitHub Pages to AWS. And later, replace the original Next.js setup with a Django version.
My gradual plan was:
Move the current static site from GitHub Pages to AWS S3 Move DNS to AWS so the domain is fully managed there Deploy the new Django version on a subdomain When everything works, switch the main domain to Django
This way, everything would already be inside AWS, and the final switch would be seamless.
The migration strategy itself was reasonable, but the problems came from how I executed it.
I was overly reliant on my Claude Code agent, which accidentally wiped all production infrastructure for the DataTalks.Club course management platform that stored data for 2.5 years of all submissions: homework, projects, leaderboard entries, for every course run through the platform.
To make matters worse, all automated snapshots were deleted too. I had to upgrade to AWS Business Support, which costs me an extra 10% for quicker assistance. Thankfully, they helped me restore the database, and the full recovery took about 24 hours.
In this post, I’ll share how I let this happen and the steps I’ve taken to prevent it from happening again.
Course management platform with no data: no courses, no questions, no answers, no login providers
Incident Timeline
... continue reading