The Servers Are Burning
logicmag.io
The Servers Are Burning
1–10 of 158 posts
Re: The Servers Are Burning
#2Wow.
1. We don't test. 2. We don't code review (or rather if we do, we do it so poorly swallowed exceptions don't raise red flags.)
That's an outrageously unprofessional software process.
Re: The Servers Are Burning
#3Wow. 1. We don't test. 2. We don't code review (or rather if we do, we do it so poorly swallowed exceptions don't raise red flags.) That's an outrageously unprofessional software process.
I was immediately struck by the same set of thoughts. I don't know whether to be appalled or just ... sad.
Re: The Servers Are Burning
#4Wow. 1. We don't test. 2. We don't code review (or rather if we do, we do it so poorly swallowed exceptions don't raise red flags.) That's an outrageously unprofessional software process.
An outrageously unprofessional software process that created a product worth $50M!
https://techcrunch.com/2011/02/02/match-com-acquires-online-...
Re: The Servers Are Burning
#5Wow. 1. We don't test. 2. We don't code review (or rather if we do, we do it so poorly swallowed exceptions don't raise red flags.) That's an outrageously unprofessional software process.
An outrageously unprofessional software process that created a product worth $50M! https://techcrunch.com/2011/02/02/match-com-acquires-online-...
The OP is about technical process in the software world. I'm not sure how a company's valuation comes into the conversation...
Re: The Servers Are Burning
#6(then-CEO Mike Maxim) thought of testing frameworks as somewhat academic, more lofty than practical.
...
Mike the CEO, who was also OkCupid’s best engineer...
Mystery of the Melting Servers, solved.
Re: The Servers Are Burning
#7If you're an early-stage startup that's still determining product-market fit, then it's completely fair to eschew tests and accumulate tech debt; you're at a higher risk of running out of runway before you've even proven that your business works.
As soon as you have enough users that an outage poses a significant risk to your business, you need to invest in either refactoring to reduce tech debt, or a rewrite. And you NEED to add tests, and a robust deployment process that tests changes at multiple stages with monitoring on the basics (server speed and memory usage, database error rate, etc).
OKCupid got lucky in this case.
Re: The Servers Are Burning
#8(Off Topic -- Rant regarding Webpage)
Can I take a short moment to bitch about "sidebar" frame or whatever the hell this domain is using? The webpage looks like a fluid single frame but the left side is static. The browser page has a scrollbar but I need to have my mouse over the correct div before my scroll wheel will move the page, its a bit aggravating since there's no visual break between the "sidebar" and the content.
Re: The Servers Are Burning
#9(Off Topic -- Rant regarding Webpage) Can I take a short moment to bitch about "sidebar" frame or whatever the hell this domain is using? The webpage looks like a fluid single frame but the left side is static. The browser page has a scrollbar but I need to have my mouse over the correct div before my scroll wheel will move the page, its a bit aggravating since there's no visual break between the "sidebar" and the co…
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Re: The Servers Are Burning
#10How could such a tiny change have such an outsized impact on the site? “That same story happened so many different times,” my old boss David told me. “Someone launched a small, relatively innocuous change that did one of the millions of unexpected things it could have done, which then happened to break some part of the site, and then bring it all down—sometimes bring it down to the point where we couldn’t recover it for hours.”
Preventing this is one of the basic motivations of functional programming. If a function is "referentially transparent" or "pure" it can't do anything unexpected. It seems to me this is the only reasonable way we can reason about software at scale.