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You've got an engineer looking to rollout a new piece of software across the entire frontend fleet of serves late Sunday afternoon. Not only that, it's to add a new transport (network protocol) to a new database, both of which have not been through any sort of analysis to determine if they were ready or how they behaved when things went bad.

All to support a production launch for the next day.

That should make you squirm. It's the stuff that the company might get away with once, but once you get enough size, it will never work again. The Risk/Reward equation just doesn't match. When these things go bad they go _really_ bad _really_ fast.

Think the machine is down, you can't connect to it and it stays up for a minimal amount of time after you reboot it and then you find out you don't know how to rollback and the person who does is at a football game enjoying many beers.

ODBC is a client API which allows devs to write to a fixed API. Then you have a ODBC driver that connects to the database, each database has their own network transport.


Yes. This post relies on the reader knowing some background to the services/business RbtB supports. She is in the top comments on HN relatively often so it probably made more sense to others more familiar.


I don't know anything about the author, but it read just fine for me. Someone else criticized the style of the writing, but I found that it was like telling a story in the way you would naturally do it face to face.

I would invite anyone who is confused about a part of the story to ask for clarification on jargon or situations.


FWIW I don't know anything about the author, other than having scanned a couple of articles from time to time (I don't recall anything I couldn't glean from reading this article), and it read fine (and was interesting to boot).


Not a customer. A junior dev trying to ship untested code to production on a day off. Then later that low quality code borked an internal system.


We can certainly hope they were junior but I don't believe the post ever says so. Also I believe there were two separate people trying to ship the thing.


FTA: "person who had never done anything to the frontend servers".

I read that as junior, at least for the skillset necessary for the task at hand.


I suppose I've seen a number of senior developers (measured in years of experience, not skills) do wildly inappropriate things both in systems they should be familiar with and in systems where they should have an awareness of their familiarity-deficit.


You can be senior in one technology and a junior (or less) in others.




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