A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subscriptions

Post by philwelch » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 6:25 AM UTC

munificent wrote: post #32

dragonwriter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mongoid follows versioning guidelines as outlined by the Semantic Versioning Specification, so you can expect only backwards incompatible changes in major versions I will note that this reverses the direction of implications. In SemVer, you should expect breaking changes only in major versions. (All version changes with breaking changes should be major, but nonbreaking changes can occur in major or minor versions.)…

I'm guessing the sentence they wrote is just a consequence of English not being the author's primary language. I frequently see ESL speakers get adjective and adverb positions wrong in ways that unintentially change the meaning. Even skilled English speakers make mistakes here because English is both very permissive about word order, but also tends to give different shades of meaning to each other. "Only" is a pernic…

Post by brian_cloutier » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 6:28 AM UTC

nightpool wrote: post #155

mchusma wrote: post #95

Stripe also bears some responsibility here, as they don't support production testing, so it's impossible to have a test suite checking for charge related behaviors in production. If you use stripe, please contact them and request this long overdue feature. (I do not think that is the primary issue, but it does not help)

For more context, what exactly do you mean by "production testing" and how do you think it would have fixed this issue? I spent 9 months developing a moderately complex Stripe integration, with thorough automated tests, and I never ran into any Stripe issues that I really would have considered a showstopper in terms of testing. Stripe's test environment setup was super super helpful throughout. But this breaking chan…

Post by emodendroket » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 6:32 AM UTC

kingcharles wrote: post #106

yholio wrote: post #35

Here's how true professionals would handle this: "We recently became aware of some erroneous subscription renewals made by our platform and traced the root cause to a major bug in downstream database technology affecting a very small number of accounts. Nonetheless, we working hard with our database provider to resolve the issue. In the meantime, if you are affected and believe you might have an unsolicited subscript…

Actually had this recently when helping out a friend who was targeted by a shady debt collection company. The only way their lawyer would speak to us is through fax, in order to try to act as a barrier to anyone actually trying to dispute their bullshit.

Post by derefr » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 6:39 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #181

munificent wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing the sentence they wrote is just a consequence of English not being the author's primary language. I frequently see ESL speakers get adjective and adverb positions wrong in ways that unintentially change the meaning. Even skilled English speakers make mistakes here because English is both very permissive about word order, but also tends to give different shades of meaning to each other. "Only" is a pernic…

It’s kind of like the saying, “all that glitters is not gold”. Gold doesn’t glitter? That makes no sense. English syntax is not mathematical logic. The song, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” is not a song about someone who is forced to receive satisfaction.

Post by joelbluminator » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 7:02 AM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #182

Gigachad wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh when you work with ruby to have to assume everything could break with any update and just unit test the shit out of everything. Of course it’s easy to miss something, but unit tests could have caught this issue. It's still just really bad work from the gem developers though. Ideally you shouldn't ever drastically change the behavior of a method. Just introduce it again with a new name and remove the old one. Yeah…

Ultimately this is why I don't like to work in Ruby. You can just never trust any line of code between the gem updates, the unhelpful signatures, the overreliance on hashes everywhere, and a million different levels of mix-ins and indirection. Yeah, it's expressive, but how much time are you really saving once you consider all these maintenance headaches?