Machines are digging
This is the story of my investigation on solving a cryptic bug that caused a very mysterious session reset. It involves, https, cookie privacy (httponly, secure), understanding of sessions, understanding of the infrastructure, team work and the obsessive need to understand why, why and why. Continue reading
In this episode I will require you to keep your eyes and sockets open. Follow me !
I just come back from a meetup at Deezer HQ this time. Deezer, you know, the online music service. And on our way out we were waiting for another dev as he went to the toilets. And when he got out here is what he said :
It’s so insane but so poetic at the same time, isn’t it? I never get tired of discussing with developers especially after two beers, when the darkest secrets of software development are unleashed (so many stories to be told here). Tech meetups are becoming part of my survival routine to get a sign from the universe that I am not alone : there are “others” like me !!
Today we had a big deal production release. And guess what, everyone is on holiday ! Happy summer everyone !!!
The release was at 2 pm, and everything on my part was already tested and validated up until our staging environment, the step before production where everything is supposed to be strictly equal to the production environment (according to the great theory of perfect software development). But around 2:30 pm, I got a phone call, an email, an instant message, AND a visit in person, simultaneously, to tell me the same thing : “THE SERVER IS BLEEDING !!! THE WEBSITE IS DYING, DON’T YOU SEE !!! LET’S ALL PANIC TOGETHER, JOIN US – NOW.”
Sometimes the devworld is just as dramatic as a Greek tragedy.
{ Tonight after work at my new job. Put a big smile on my face. Finally i am interacting with fun guys 🙂 }
We’re working under pressure at work to release a sport website covering the olympics for Wednesday, since the olympics start next Friday. And there is still a lot of work to do. I finally understood where the pressure comes from.
Posted in Devsworld
This morning our coding best practice guru made us do our first coding dojo. I had no idea what that was, for me “dojo” vaguely referred to a javascript library. But actually, “dojo” is the Japanese word for the place where students practice their martial art. So by extent a coding dojo is a coding exercise where devs practice their code. Aha!
Posted in Discoveries, Devsworld
Friday 9:00 pm, I’m the last one to leave work. I had to finish coding a block for the next day that became priority 1 at 5 pm. Burnt. To add to the sudden panic/weird aura, friday was the day we decided to start a new tradition of drinking and chatting after work at 5pm, right in the open space. So after 2 beers, crackers and a tomato, I went back coding. It was already almost done, but I still needed to test it. Then everybody went home but me.
On my way to leave the office, I suddenly looked at the deserted place differently and noticed the tv we had installed just for us. It was beautiful.
Posted in Devsworld
Welcome back
Last week I took a day off on Friday. So when I came back to work on Monday morning I was all bright and shiny ready to work happily. Then, a product manager came to me with a ten feet face. She said “we are so late, the journalists are not happy, I received a very angry email from them saying that the website we launched last week is crap.” Then she pulled out a pile of post-its and as she was sticking them on the wall she said “We need to do all this. It’s for last week.” That set the tone of my lousy week.
A strange thought (among others) has crossed my mind today, it totally made my day. Let me come to it.
So, I have been learning code refactoring lately at work, one of the things that happened during my blogging coma. We have been peer programming and doing code reviews to share coding best practices. It’s a very worthy and interesting exercise, even if it’s still a bit difficult to not consider your code like a personal “creation” (d-d-d-don’t touch it!). There is always a little fear when another consciousness reads your code and rewrites it, but it’s a good way to improve your coding skills quickly.
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