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The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

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Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#41

Post by protomyth »

wsinks wrote: post #14
protomyth wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went the whole nine yards on that project. I had white (black font) for my own machine, green for development, blue for integration test, yellow for system test, and red for production. I liked the green / white text theme the most with blue being my second favorite to write code in so those got the ones I would use the most. I was never a lover of the old amber terminals and red is just plain painful to write on.…

Was it automated? If so, how?

I cannot remember the terminal program, but I had a file that set the colors and logged me in to the environment then set a bunch of variables. I was on a NT then 2000 box. Might have been a version of teraterm.

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#43

Post by iaw »

neuromantik8086 wrote: post #11
throwaway7645 wrote: post #6

Did anyone ever confirm it wasn't a hoax? Or find the actual company?

I mean, wasn't the crux of this story a plot point in Silicon Valley? Either its a hoax or Silicon Valley is truly uncannily realistic.

> Silicon Valley is truly uncannily realistic.

Silicon Valley and Veep are both disturbingly prescient.

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#44

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

neuromantik8086 wrote: post #11
throwaway7645 wrote: post #6

Did anyone ever confirm it wasn't a hoax? Or find the actual company?

I mean, wasn't the crux of this story a plot point in Silicon Valley? Either its a hoax or Silicon Valley is truly uncannily realistic.

> Either its a hoax or Silicon Valley is truly uncannily realistic.

A rule of thumb is that the really ridiculous stuff in Silicon Valley like the "three commas" or the "blood boy", actually happened.

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#45

Post by heisenbit »

Once I was put in charge of running regularly some DB scripts for a social site (non profit, not a payed job) with about 10K active users. It was all manual as the nobody had the time and skill to automate it. There was no development site, there was only production so adding any automation was also risky. And of course one fateful Sunday I pasted a script that was not properly adjusted and the DB was fubar. It took us more than a day to recover - thankfully we had a recently current backup. Later we all spoke about it and also did a write-up. The debriefing helped a lot processing the shock but for a long time I loathed to log into the DB.

When I'm fully in control I engineer things in a way that make disasters unlikely and easily recoverable. But that is not always possible. I tend to avoid touching any production DB but again that is not always possible.

I always believed I have a developer mindset more than an operational mindset and worked more in roles compatible with the former than the larger. When looking at the devops culture I always wonder whether the lessons of strict control of production environments are getting enough attention. There is value is closing the gap between the two world but please leave a gap.

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#46

Post by pfranz »

protomyth wrote: post #8
ng12 wrote: post #2

This article clearly missed the point. He didn't make a huge mistake, he made a very tiny one. The company/CTO made the huge mistakes.

A old supervisor of mine told me that "You treat a new developer like a duckling near a pond with Northern Pike". There is no way you let them have access to production (or frankly, anything past a development environment) until they have been there a while and gotten the hang of it. On a tangent, I was paranoid enough in one position to have all my production terminal windows have a red background with yellow text.…

I really like having a strong, visual indicator when you're doing something dangerous, as well.

I had a job where we would often sudo as other users and ssh into other boxes. I kept trying and trying to find a way to change the terminal when sudoed as someone else because occasionally I would execute something in the first terminal I could grab. At the time I couldn't find anything or think of a way.

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#47

Post by illumin8 »

neoCrimeLabs wrote: post #36

Unrelated to the story, but I've had a similar experience as to some of the stories described in the article - where a cascade of unseen problems landed on my lap and I took the blame even though little of it was my doing. (Note, this was many years ago and mildly traumatic, so some details might be fuzzy) In 2001 I was working for one of the larger internet server co-location companies in the US as a dedicated custo…

Wow, incredible story. I used to be a Sun SSE, so I can feel for you. I know hindsight is 20/20, but this was my approach when replacing failed hardware like memory DIMMs remotely (when the client wasn't there in the datacenter): - I always asked them to do a full shutdown,"init 5", and would wait until the server physically powered off before working. That would verify I was on the right server. If the server didn't power off because the customer did something wrong like "init 0" instead of "init 5", I would connect to the serial console and verify that it was sitting at an openboot prompt. - When I ran into a software-related issue like "DB won't start," I would never touch anything or try to fix it. I know you had great intentions, but fixing the init scripts opens you up to a ton of potential hurt. As they say: "no good deed goes unpunished..."

I really don't want you to think I'm criticizing your actions - you were a true hero to the customer in a crazy situation. I think its truly unfortunate that they terminated you for this. Best of luck!

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#48

Post by neoCrimeLabs »

illumin8 wrote: post #47
neoCrimeLabs wrote: post #36

Unrelated to the story, but I've had a similar experience as to some of the stories described in the article - where a cascade of unseen problems landed on my lap and I took the blame even though little of it was my doing. (Note, this was many years ago and mildly traumatic, so some details might be fuzzy) In 2001 I was working for one of the larger internet server co-location companies in the US as a dedicated custo…

Wow, incredible story. I used to be a Sun SSE, so I can feel for you. I know hindsight is 20/20, but this was my approach when replacing failed hardware like memory DIMMs remotely (when the client wasn't there in the datacenter): - I always asked them to do a full shutdown,"init 5", and would wait until the server physically powered off before working. That would verify I was on the right server. If the server didn't…

Totally agree. I was much younger then, and learned a lot from the experience. Even got a better job as a result. :-)

Re: The tech world is rallying around a young developer who made a huge mistake

#49

Post by Evolved »

protomyth wrote: post #10
zaphod12 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not paranoid! That's a fantastic thing to do and one that I highly recommend for anyone. It's terribly easy to forget which environment you're working in when you get distracted for a moment and that's how mistakes happen.

I went the whole nine yards on that project. I had white (black font) for my own machine, green for development, blue for integration test, yellow for system test, and red for production. I liked the green / white text theme the most with blue being my second favorite to write code in so those got the ones I would use the most. I was never a lover of the old amber terminals and red is just plain painful to write on.…

It may not be a coincidence that you preferred the green with white text theme the most. [0]

[0] https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/3871/which-shade...

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