Times I've Messed Up as a Developer

Post by nucleardog » Wed, Oct 11, 2017, 5:05 PM UTC

nisse72 wrote: post #83

3131s wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also alias "rm -i" or "rm -I" to "rm" to avert major catastrophes. From man rm: -i prompt before every removal -I prompt once before removing more than three files, or when removing recursively; less intrusive than -i, while still giving protection against most mistakes

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…

Post by db48x » Wed, Oct 11, 2017, 9:12 PM UTC

Karupan wrote: post #121

During the beta for a product, we were working on sending out daily summary emails to our users. We had a cron job which should run at 8:00 AM in the morning which would process the queue and summarize all activities into a single email. It being a very long day, I deployed the job with the cron expression * 8 * * * instead of 0 8 * * * , which meant it ran EVERY minute starting at 8:00 AM instead of just once. The n…

Post by stephengillie » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 12:09 AM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #61

stephengillie wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really wish there was some practical information course at compsci with these kind of tips to prevent the most common slippages This is everyday Operations work. There is no school that teaches the eclectic mix of OS and container, networks and routes, app/db/code, CI/CD, BC/DR, writing KB articles, running standups and meetings, triage technical issues, configuration management, Change Control, and Incident Mana…

I also wonder how effective a program can be at teaching this kind of thing. No amount of studying ever ingrained something in my mind as well as the adrenaline shot of somehow fucking up production. I'm not aware of any pedagogical methods to engage the endocrine system, but I find it very useful for retention.

Post by ptman » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 6:54 AM 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…