Spyke

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What's the worst way you ever broke production?

I once "biased for action" and removed some "unused" NS records to "fix" a flakey DNS resolution issue without telling anyone on a Friday afternoon before going out to dinner with family.

Turns out my fix did not work and those DNS records were actually important. Checked on the website halfway into the meal and freaked the fuck out once I realized the site went from resolving 90% of the time to not resolving at all. The worst part was when I finally got the guts to report I messed up on the group channel, DNS was somehow still resolving for both our internal monitoring and for everyone else who tried manually. My issue got shoo-shoo'd away, and I was left there not even sure of what to do next.

I spent the rest of my time on my phone, refreshing the website and resolving domain names in an online Dig tool over and over again, anxiety growing, knowing I couldn't do anything to fix my "fix" while I was outside.

Once I came home I ended up reversing everything I did which seemed to bring it back to the original flakey state. Learned the value of SOPs and taking things slow after that (and also to not screw with DNS).

If this story has a happy ending, it's that we did eventually fix the flakey DNS issue later, going through a more rigorous review this time. On the other hand, how and why I, a junior at the time, became the de facto owner of an entire product's DNS infra remains a big mystery to me.

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Does anyone else feel like every year is like the movie 'Groundhog Day'? Same holidays, same birthdays, same work week, etc

It's starting to. I think for me at least it's because I'm missing checkpoints in life. Every year used to be its own well-defined column of paint on a canvas but ever since I started working, the last few columns have felt like one giant smear.

I don't like where I've ended up so been trying to make my own goals and hobbies but it takes so much more effort than when most goals were planned for you in school. Perhaps something to add to the New Year's resolutions...

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Not really a language you would write in but WebAssembly. I have this dream of a single WASM runtime environment across web, desktop, mobile with devs writing apps once, compiling them down to WASM, distributing them over the Internet, and users running them on any platform they like.

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If you had to restart your job at your current employer, what would you do differently?

Letting it bleed so much into life. My job and my hobby (code) have significant overlap. Stuff I learned on the job started making hobby coding not fun and shortcomings at the job started to feel like my own personal failures. I am slowly learning to separate my work and personal identities, to understand that my employer's stuff is not my own, and to leave work at work when work ends. I wish I had done that from the first day though.

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The US Army is pushing adoption of Agile (2024)

"Hi team, customers observing BigCannon is missing enemy about 90% of time since latest update. Red faction reported issue 4pm ET today and opposing Blue faction was able to re-pro. Can we get all hands on deck to deep dive and push a fix by midnight so both sides can start reliably shooting at each other again before tomorrow morning? Thanks"

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This is literally how this all started for us lol. Senior wanted to try to migrate everything to Kotlin in our project. Migration never finished. Now one of our major repos is just half Kotlin half Java. Devs on our team learn Kotlin by unexpectedly encountering it when they need to touch that code.

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What's the longest line you've ever waited in?

Waited 3 hours for a Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios.

Family used to go to Disney World in Orlando every winter when I was a kid, and we ended up visiting Universal too one of the years. At the time, the Harry Potter section was still new so everyone wanted to check it out. We got in line for the main ride which runs through a giant Hogwarts castle. Every time we thought we had finally made it, the line snaked into a new room and we would all groan. We probably shuffled through rooms for like 2 hours until the line went outside and you could finally see the sheer volume of people ahead of us. Eventually we did make it and I was very excited to finally see what the ride was-!

Turns out the entire thing was just 15 minutes of rocking around on a seat while watching a projected video of some dudes on broomsticks.

I remember the first thing we all joked about afterwards was how much of a let-down the final ride was after all that build-up. Funny enough, today I still only really remember the wait in line and almost nothing about the ride.

This also ended up being the last of our Orlando trips. My mom found out she had cancer around that time and would pass a few years later. Now writing this out, I wonder how she felt back then, spending one of her last remaining moments in this world waiting in line for a silly theme park ride.

For me at least, the entire thing is still a fond memory with family.