Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
So, funny story with a bit of self promotion at the end.
I was recently checking out some apps on playstore and found that my first ever , "launched just to experiment" app (released 1.5 years ago) has received more than 5k downloads . I was very happy about that so posted a small message on LinkedIn .
Now , my LinkedIn profile consists of 98% people who are totally strangers and never met me ( is it just me or do you also get a lot of stranger connect requests there?). So my usual post rarely ever goes beyond 5 or 6 likes.
Bit idk how there too my post got 35+ likes and now i was on cloud9.
So i finally decided to kick my ass and release some update to that app ( it had around 70% pity comments like "nice first app,but it should have this x feature",. "overall nice but it could use an x feature " etc.
And boy what my journey was in the last 72hours.
Firstly my madhead laptop started killing me with the battery failures and constant hang.
Then my past asshole self tried to give me a middle finger. So i have this whole partition in my memory where i keep my Android stuff and apps. It has a special folder named published zone and i keep all my published app codes and related files there.
I was fairly certain that this app's code eill be also there,so i opened it, found the code and tried running it.
Turns out my asshole self had tried to mess around the code so much that all the db layer WAS fucked up, all the ui WAS changed and no code was working.
"Not to worry", i thought. I always use git and there would be a correct version some commits before. WRONG. I HAD CHANGED THE WHOLE FUCKING WORKING PRODUCTION CODE AND DIDN'T MAINTAIN A VCS!
Also this was the verbose and shitty java code my 1.5 year before self so loved to write, so it was taking me way more time to figure out what's happening in an already fucked up code.
So i tried a couple of ways to get back my working code :
- I tried looking for a google recommended solution. Those guys take my whole app code build and distribute via playstore, but they provide no means to retrieve back the original code.
- i checked my (occasionally) back up hard disk but no. My hard disk would have 100s of movies from 2016 , but not a useful piece of fuckin code.
- i also tried to get my apk and decompile it via some online decompiler. Here the google again fucks up and don't allow me to get my apk directly. Meanwhile i found a ton of shady websites which are hosting an apk of my app without my knowledge O_o . I tried to decompile on of them but code was even more non understandable than my fuck up code.
So i ended up looking at both the mess up code and decompiled code and coded the whole app from scratch ( well not scratch, i extracted the resources and some undamaged activities from the mess up code . Also github was down for more than 3 hours yesterday , at the same time when i was trying to look onto some repositories)
Lessons learned:
- DON'T FUCK UP WITH THE PRODUCTION CODE
- MAINTAIN VCS
- Your laptop is shit reliable, github is also shit reliable , so save code at multiple places.
- there are way more copies of your code lying on the internet than you think.
Checkout my app here :https://play.google.com/store/apps/...
random