Halden fixed a checkout outage in seventeen minutes. When EU cards began failing after a deploy, Orrin found the commit, wrote the fix and had it waiting for review before the incident channel had filled up.
- 2 min
- from the issue to a pull request waiting for approval
- 3 lines
- in the fix, with a new test that failed before it
- 71%
- of Orrin's pull requests at Halden merged unchanged
Halden
Subscription checkout for independent brands
- Based in
- Amsterdam
- Engineers
- 48
- Plan
- Team
- Since
- November 2025
The afternoon of CHECKOUT-482
At 14:02 on a Thursday, a deploy to Halden's checkout service moved customers' tax details into a new billing profile. One function, taxFields(), still read them from the old place, and every EU card payment, which needs a VAT check, began to fail.
Maya Chen filed the issue at 14:09 with the error count in it. Orrin had read the trace, found the commit and written a failing test by 14:11, and asked for approval. Chen read a three-line diff, held Approve, and the fix was live at 14:19.
“The diff was three lines and the reasoning was right there. Approving it took less time than writing the incident update.”
Why it was fast
Nothing about the bug was hard. What Orrin removed was the search: twelve commits since 13:30, a trace that pointed at a file nobody had touched that day, and the pressure of a payments outage with the finance team watching the channel.
The run on Orrin's home page is CHECKOUT-482, replayed with Halden's permission.
How Halden uses it
Orrin runs on any error in Halden's checkout and billing services that passes ten events in an hour. Approvals come through Slack, where the incident channel already lives. Of the 212 pull requests it has opened since November, 71% merged unchanged.