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The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

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Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#51

Post by throwanem »

throwanem wrote: post #31
tbirrell wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar setup, and it is relatively easy to set up using .bashrc and terminal color variables.

I did something similar with a shell script for MySQL databases, both to support shorthand invocation (i.e. "mysql foo-bar-baz" to look up the named configuration, expand it into whatever set of arguments is defined therein, and invoke mysql(1) accordingly), and to allow for detailed and environment-specific prompts which warn me when I'm targeting production. It's hideous, of course. But it works very well for me, a…

It's more hideous than I remembered! But for anyone interested, here you are:

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8ec128e88dac85d93ed58fb518...

Outside GNU coreutils, the only dependencies are mysql(1) (of course) and jq(1), which is more or less "awk for JSON" and which I strongly recommend to anyone who regularly deals with that file format.

Share and Enjoy!

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#52

Post by Zhenya »

protomyth wrote: post #8
ng12 wrote: post #2

This 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.…

Apparently Northern Pike can eat ducklings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_E4BUt1z8Y

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#53

Post by caseydurfee »

wsinks wrote: post #14
protomyth wrote: post #10

Earlier 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 use a little shell script to send iTerm2 proprietary escape codes to change the color of the terminal window based on the value of $*.

https://iterm2.com/documentation-escape-codes.html

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#54

Post by scrumper »

neoCrimeLabs wrote: post #48
illumin8 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, incredible story. I used to be a Sun SSE, so I can feel for you. I know hindsight is 20/20, but this was my approach when replacing failed hardware like memory DIMMs remotely (when the client wasn't there in the datacenter): - I always asked them to do a full shutdown,"init 5", and would wait until the server physically powered off before working. That would verify I was on the right server. If the server didn't…

Totally agree. I was much younger then, and learned a lot from the experience. Even got a better job as a result. :-)

Good for you taking something positive from the experience, but man that must have hurt at the time! I know that at I at least was a lot less humble at the start of my career than I am now.

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#55

Post by SubuSS »

I am surprised they even have their prod data cloned into test servers: Get to any reasonable size and this becomes a huge no-no. There were major measures in MS/Amazon (where I spent a bunch of time) and now at snap to ensure prod data isn't even visible without a bunch of hoops to jump through.

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#56

Post by protomyth »

Evolved wrote: post #49
protomyth wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.…

It may not be a coincidence that you preferred the green with white text theme the most. [0] [0] https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/3871/which-shade...

Interesting link. I chalked it up to a misspent youth on green terminals, but I do like the idea its really science.

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#57

Post by lgas »

protomyth wrote: post #8
ng12 wrote: post #2

This 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.…

DBVisualizer has a setting that lets you designate different color schemes for different databases. It's saved me more than once.

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#58

Post by protomyth »

jt2190 wrote: post #12
protomyth wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Inexperienced folks really haven't had that "oh hell" moment of contemplating what could go wrong and the experience to know how bad it can go wrong.

I was at a site when a truck hit the power main and the UPS (diesel if I recall) for the server room failed to work. The new people were in the "It shouldn't take too long to reboot the servers" where the experienced people were "this is going to be a very long day". The later group was rewarded with a 36 hour day.

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#59

Post by protomyth »

Zhenya wrote: post #52
protomyth wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Apparently Northern Pike can eat ducklings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_E4BUt1z8Y

Yep, fairly horrific. They will also attack a swimmer for no apparent reason other than they are an evil, foul-tempered fish. The bigger ones can make you bleed quite quickly. River barracuda is a name I heard once.

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#60

Post by reitanqild »

lgas wrote: post #57
protomyth wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

DBVisualizer has a setting that lets you designate different color schemes for different databases. It's saved me more than once.

I think TOAD has as well.
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