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Search - "#production #regret"
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[This makes me sound really bad at first, please read the whole thing]
Back when I first started freelancing I worked for a client who ran a game server hosting company. My job was to improve their system for updating game servers. This was one of my first clients and I didn't dare to question the fact that he was getting me to work on the production environment as they didn't have a development one setup. I came to regret that decision when out of no where during the first test, files just start deleting. I panicked as one would and tried to stop the webserver it was running on but oh no, he hasn't given me access to any of that. I thought well shit, I might as well see where I fucked up since it was midnight for him and I wasn't able to get a hold of him. I looked at every single line hundreds of times trying to see why it would have started deleting files. I found no cause. Exhausted, (This was 6am by this point) I pretty much passed out. I woke up around 5 hours later with my face on my keyboard (I know you've all done that) only to see a good 30 messages from the client screaming at me. It turns out that during that time every single client's game server had been deleted. Before responding and begging for forgiveness, I decided to take another crack at finding the root of the problem. It wasn't my fault. I had found the cause! It turns out a previous programmer had a script that would run "rm -rf" + (insert file name here) on the old server files, only he had fucked up the line and it would run "rm -rf /". I have never felt more relieved in my life. This script had been disabled by the original programmer but the client had set it to run again so that I could remake the system. Now, I was never told about this specific script as it was for a game they didn't host anymore.
I realise this is getting very long so I'll speed it up a bit.
He didn't want to take the blame and said I added the code and it was all my fault. He told me I could be on live chat support for 3 months at his company or pay $10,000. Out of all of this I had at least made sure to document what I was doing and backup every single file before I touched them which managed to save my ass when it came to him threatening legal action. I showed him my proof which resulted in him trying to guilt trip me to work for him for free as he had lost about 80% of his clients. By this point I had been abused constantly for 4 weeks by this son of a bitch. As I was underage he had said that if we went to court he'd take my parents house and make them live on the street. So how does one respond? A simple "Fuck off you cunt" and a block.
That was over 8 years ago and I haven't heard from him since.
If you've made it this far, congrats, you deserve a cookie!6 -
A while back a co-worker of mine fucked up by leaving some debug code and pushing to production.
He quickly repaired it, redeployed and everything was good again before the customer experienced any issues.
Later that day, management showed up by his desk to ask what happened, how it happened and stating that he was not "angry enough" about his fuck up, long after it has been repaired.
Up to this day i regret not asking in what unit of measurement we could determine if we were angry enough; decibels? gray hairs? grams of shit in my underwear?4 -
Best "short-term" solution that is still in production.
By best, I mean the one that you regret seeing but too afraid to touch1 -
How could I only name one favorite dev tool? There are a *lot* I could not live without anymore.
# httpie
I have to talk to external API a lot and curl is painful to use. HTTPie is super human friendly and helps bootstrapping or testing calls to unknown endpoints.
https://httpie.org/
# jq
grep|sed|awk for for json documents. So powerful, so handy. I have to google the specific syntax a lot, but when you have it working, it works like a charm.
https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
# ag-silversearcher
Finding strings in projects has never been easier. It's fast, it has meaningful defaults (no results from vendors and .git directories) and powerful options.
https://github.com/ggreer/...
# git
Lifesaver. Nough said.
And tweak your command line to show the current branch and git to have tab-completion.
# Jetbrains flavored IDE
No matter if the flavor is phpstorm, intellij, webstorm or pycharm, these IDE are really worth their money and have saved me so much time and keystrokes, it's totally awesome. It also has an amazing plugin ecosystem, I adore the symfony and vim-idea plugin.
# vim
Strong learning curve, it really pays off in the end and I still consider myself novice user.
# vimium
Chrome plugin to browse the web with vi keybindings.
https://github.com/philc/vimium
# bash completion
Enable it. Tab-increase your productivity.
# Docker / docker-compose
Even if you aren't pushing docker images to production, having a dockerfile re-creating the live server is such an ease to setup and bootstrapping the development process has been a joy in the process. Virtual machines are slow and take away lot of space. If you can, use alpine-based images as a starting point, reuse the offical one on dockerhub for common applications, and keep them simple.
# ...
I will post this now and then regret not naming all the tools I didn't mention. -
I'm still a junior myself, but some fundamentals I've told my coworkers:
* Commit more, regret less
* Yes, you can remove a commit, if something goes wrong.
* No, I'll not explain again how to undo a commit you pushed typo to you feature branch. Feel the shame of pushing "Fix typo" commits
* ask, if you are stuck or unsure.
* don't do deployments at 5pm Friday. 6pm results in less crashes in production for some reason /s
* Don't be like me. Go to sleep at appropriate times2 -
I'm on a project that has been off the rails for a few weeks. We're no longer working off tickets/the scrum board. Clients are asking for production servers yesterday.
Things are behind. Some people are working nights and weekends. I'm one of the people who are vary vocal about not working over time and I haven't worked a single night or weekend yet (we're salary exempt too; no extra pay).
I even bought up in a meeting how I was not happy about people being guilt tripped for not working over (our PO messaged me out of band a few weeks back telling me my teammates would appreciate me putting in more effort).
I agreed to work this Sunday and already regret it, even though they said there'd be compensation (without mentioning what that compensation is). I was also told everyone is doing it and that's not true either.
In my 18 years in IT, I've worked at ~ 13 companies. This one is in the bottom 3 for sure.2