I Accidentally Deleted 7TB of Videos Before Going to Production

> It involves bad practices and errors from multiple parties in a world that might seem

> foreign to the "Silicon Valley" world but paints an accurate picture of what

> development is for small IT companies around the world

Everybody makes mistakes even in the "Silicon Valley" world, but such problems cloud be easily caught by testing (which he did but it was restricted to the first page) and performing a simple dry-run.

> 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("I'm about to delete video {id}")

    print("Deleted {count} videos") # maybe even assert
    ...

Then dump out to a file and spot check it five times before running for real.

in my opinion any process that isn't preceded by another identical and automated process that varies only by the data involved is very risky to do in production. your management hopefully had a big reality check? or not because of backups?

So, “i am under NDA” but I reveal my client’s name and a lot of sensitive details about what we are doing. LOL.

This was my first thought too. Another think I like to do, is to limit the loop to say one page or 10 entries and check after each run that it was correctly executed. It makes it a half-automated task, but saves time in the long run.