Times I've Messed Up as a Developer

Post by ssijak » Tue, Oct 10, 2017, 9:19 PM UTC

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #55

Back in the nineties, at a previous employer, I wrote a code generator that read a kind of DSL from stdin and spat out C source to stdout. Having written the initial version and got it to compile, I thought I should test it before checking it into RCS for the first time. So I ran it with some simple input and piped the output to something like program.c. At that point I remembered that the code generator's main sourc…

Post by theleftfielder » Tue, Oct 10, 2017, 9:56 PM UTC

madamelic wrote: post #49

brianwawok wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have never screwed up anything in production, no one at your org trusts you enough to give you production access. Which is ok and great for you, but at the end of the day SOMEONE has to have production access. You can write a devops template that wipes out data just as easy as you can sudo rm -rf /

I am much more terrified of Terraform than myself, especially `terraform destroy`. I mean, a human can only do so much so quickly but a script could kill everything semi-instantly. I look at `terraform plan -destroy` and it still terrifies to destroy an internal service.

Post by Huggernaut » Tue, Oct 10, 2017, 10:10 PM UTC

Post by nisse72 » Tue, Oct 10, 2017, 10:56 PM UTC

chias wrote: post #110

nisse72 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This alias seems to be set by default in many linux distributions these days (and has been that way for many years now). The problem is that you get used to this crutch and rely on it, until one day you're logged in someplace without the alias and end up deleting something you shouldn't. I'm not a fan and normally disable it. Instead, I prefer to be very careful and deliberate when using rm, especially with any wildc…

> This alias seems to be set by default in many linux distributions these days (and has been that way for many years now) Which Linux distributions do this? I have not seen this alias set by default on any distribution that I've used recently (Gentoo, Linux Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, Crunchbang, Arch).

Post by hinkley » Tue, Oct 10, 2017, 11:51 PM UTC

amyjess wrote: post #15

Spoom wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always write DELETEs as SELECTs, and once you run the SELECT and it returns the rows you want, then swap out the SELECT * with a DELETE.

That's good advice in general, not just for SQL. For example, I often write my 'rm' commands as 'ls' at first and then swap out the command once I know it gets the right thing.