The company was lucky to have someone like you that could actually sort out real problems efficiently. I would bring up this story when negotiating for a raise.
I Accidentally Deleted 7TB of Videos Before Going to Production
231–240 of 362 posts
Re: I Accidentally Deleted 7TB of Videos Before Going to Production
#232> but at the time the code seemed completely correct to me It always does. > Well, it teaches me to do more diverse tests when doing destructive operations. Or add some logging and do a dry run and check the results, literally simple prints statements: print("-----") print("Downloading videos ids from url: {url}") print(list of ids) ... ... ... # delete() dangerous action commented out until I'm sure it's right print…
To ensure that the files are actually are downloaded (step1), before deleting the original (step2). I would make make step1 an input to step2. That is step2 cannot work without step1. Something like:
(step1) Download video from URL. Include the Id in the filename.
(step2) Grab the list of files that have been downloaded and parse to get the Id. Using the Id, delete the original file.Re: I Accidentally Deleted 7TB of Videos Before Going to Production
#233"What does this teach us? Well, it teaches me to do more diverse tests when doing destructive operations. It also should probably teach something to Vimeo and to my contractor but I doubt it will (and yes, the upload for some reason is still manual to this day. Go figure!)" So you wrote bad code, didn't test it properly, ran it on production on the Friday before a release and are blaming Vimeo and [name redacted]? An…
Oof, we wouldn't work well together. Very rarely is someone good enough to be this obnoxious.
I very much doubt you would ever work with or for me.
Re: I Accidentally Deleted 7TB of Videos Before Going to Production
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hell, GitHub does that to an extent, with the "type the name of this repository to delete it" prompts. Typing the name of the repository isn't exactly perfect, but it's an interesting direction.
There was a thread recently about a repo that accidentally went private and lost all of its stars because of confusion with GH teams vs GH profile readme repo naming. I think this type of prompt is very useful for explicitly preventing the rare worst case scenarios but the problem is making any type of prompt "routine" so that our brains fail to process it.
This is it I think. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31033758
Re: I Accidentally Deleted 7TB of Videos Before Going to Production
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hell, GitHub does that to an extent, with the "type the name of this repository to delete it" prompts. Typing the name of the repository isn't exactly perfect, but it's an interesting direction.
There was a thread recently about a repo that accidentally went private and lost all of its stars because of confusion with GH teams vs GH profile readme repo naming. I think this type of prompt is very useful for explicitly preventing the rare worst case scenarios but the problem is making any type of prompt "routine" so that our brains fail to process it.
The suggestion in that post about how to fix it is good, and mirrors one I read in the Rachael by the Bay blog - type the number of machines to continue:
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/10/26/num/
The take away by both is there is actually something to do which can wake people up when the stakes are high, and they might not be doing what they expect.
Re: I Accidentally Deleted 7TB of Videos Before Going to Production
#236[deleted]
Re: I Accidentally Deleted 7TB of Videos Before Going to Production
#237A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
Imagine coding while drinking tequila...
Re: I Accidentally Deleted 7TB of Videos Before Going to Production
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
there's an argument that the best people around are the people who have already (or almost) made some big mistakes. I have made a couple of huge ones - luckily I kept my job
When interviewing candidates I always enquire about their professional mistakes. Their reply often is the decider between hiring/rejecting. I want to have colleagues who admit fault, be truthful about actions which lead to the issue, and learn from it. The learning includes organisations perhaps putting additional measures in place to prevent future issues. One candidate told of a story how he was On-Call early in hi…
It’s funny how so many managers on this board are like, yeah I focus disproportionately much on this one factor. Why? Because my intuition and experience says so.
Re: I Accidentally Deleted 7TB of Videos Before Going to Production
#239What negativity and arrogance in the comments here. Jeez, it's like no one HN ever made a mistake, a bunch of 10xers ninja programmers here. Please read this: >I also want to preface this whole post by saying that I'm a Junior Developer with less than one year of actual experience. Some of the things that might seem obvious to some might not be so for me, thanks! It's just some kid sharing a mistake they made and own…
Just to be fair also to some commenters, I think that the post had been edited after posting from what I remember ... so maybe the older comments are not very relevant.
To clarify, I only removed the company name and added the top disclaimer
Re: I Accidentally Deleted 7TB of Videos Before Going to Production
#240There's a thing called unit tests.