Did anyone ever confirm it wasn't a hoax? Or find the actual company?
I mean, wasn't the crux of this story a plot point in Silicon Valley? Either its a hoax or Silicon Valley is truly uncannily realistic.
The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake
11–20 of 62 posts
Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake
#12This article clearly missed the point. He didn't make a huge mistake, he made a very tiny one. The company/CTO made the huge mistakes.
A old supervisor of mine told me that "You treat a new developer like a duckling near a pond with Northern Pike". There is no way you let them have access to production (or frankly, anything past a development environment) until they have been there a while and gotten the hang of it. On a tangent, I was paranoid enough in one position to have all my production terminal windows have a red background with yellow text.…
Indeed. The difference between an experienced person a naive one is not that the experienced person doesn't make mistakes, but that they fully expect to make mistakes so they take precautions to mitigate their effects, take measures to prevent them, and minimize doing work that is mistake-prone.
Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake
#13Glad to see more folks discussing this. I'm sure it's reassuring to the new developer that this wasn't their fault. It's still amazing how badly that company is being managed from a technical perspective.
Or... since no aspect of the story is verifiable, and much of it is nonsensical in the reactions of all parties involved, it is completely fake.
What would be the motivation behind fabricating a story like this?
I see posts of this nature all the time on r/csquestions. This one just happened to go viral.
Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not paranoid! That's a fantastic thing to do and one that I highly recommend for anyone. It's terribly easy to forget which environment you're working in when you get distracted for a moment and that's how mistakes happen.
I went the whole nine yards on that project. I had white (black font) for my own machine, green for development, blue for integration test, yellow for system test, and red for production. I liked the green / white text theme the most with blue being my second favorite to write code in so those got the ones I would use the most. I was never a lover of the old amber terminals and red is just plain painful to write on.…
Was it automated? If so, how?
Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or... since no aspect of the story is verifiable, and much of it is nonsensical in the reactions of all parties involved, it is completely fake.
What would be the motivation behind fabricating a story like this? I see posts of this nature all the time on r/csquestions. This one just happened to go viral.
> What would be the motivation behind fabricating a story like this?
Lulz, getting one over on the Internet, being able to fabricate a plausible story and see people all over the world reacting to it. Some people get off on weird stuff.
Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake
#16This article clearly missed the point. He didn't make a huge mistake, he made a very tiny one. The company/CTO made the huge mistakes.
The company/CTO made the huge mistakes.
Indeed. To capitalize on a meme in current circulation, "One does not simply 'accidentally destroy' a production database."
When things like this happen, they happen because someone who almost certainly did, in fact, know better -- at some point made a conscious decision to allow them to happen, by consciously cutting corners in certain matters of due diligence that we all know about. Things like backup systems, database roles, and hiring the right people to set up and maintain these things.
Not because of something a junior dev did.
Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not paranoid! That's a fantastic thing to do and one that I highly recommend for anyone. It's terribly easy to forget which environment you're working in when you get distracted for a moment and that's how mistakes happen.
I went the whole nine yards on that project. I had white (black font) for my own machine, green for development, blue for integration test, yellow for system test, and red for production. I liked the green / white text theme the most with blue being my second favorite to write code in so those got the ones I would use the most. I was never a lover of the old amber terminals and red is just plain painful to write on.…
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Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake
#18This article clearly missed the point. He didn't make a huge mistake, he made a very tiny one. The company/CTO made the huge mistakes.
A old supervisor of mine told me that "You treat a new developer like a duckling near a pond with Northern Pike". There is no way you let them have access to production (or frankly, anything past a development environment) until they have been there a while and gotten the hang of it. On a tangent, I was paranoid enough in one position to have all my production terminal windows have a red background with yellow text.…
An old team did a similar thing! A terminal window with a skull and crossbones when you log into anything that's ".prod.X.com".
Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went the whole nine yards on that project. I had white (black font) for my own machine, green for development, blue for integration test, yellow for system test, and red for production. I liked the green / white text theme the most with blue being my second favorite to write code in so those got the ones I would use the most. I was never a lover of the old amber terminals and red is just plain painful to write on.…
Was it automated? If so, how?
It doesn't help the terminal itself, but changing your ~/.vimrc to use different themes can help.
Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went the whole nine yards on that project. I had white (black font) for my own machine, green for development, blue for integration test, yellow for system test, and red for production. I liked the green / white text theme the most with blue being my second favorite to write code in so those got the ones I would use the most. I was never a lover of the old amber terminals and red is just plain painful to write on.…
Was it automated? If so, how?
I have a similar setup, and it is relatively easy to set up using .bashrc and terminal color variables.