2019 YEAR END Definitely Not a Clip Show

In this Hasty Treat, Wes and Scott talk about their new Apple MacBook Pro's with the M1 Max CPU. Sanity - Sponsor Sanity.io is a real-time headless CMS with a fully customizable Content Studio built in React. Get a Sanity powered site up and running in minutes at sanity.io/create. Get an awesome supercharged free developer plan on sanity.io/syntax. Sentry - Sponsor If you want to know what’s happening with your code, track errors and monitor performance with Sentry. Sentry’s Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health. Cut your time on error resolution from hours to minutes. It works with any language and integrates with dozens of other services. Syntax listeners new to Sentry can get two months for free by visiting Sentry.io and using the coupon code TASTYTREAT during sign up. Show Notes 04:30 The last time we upgraded 07:05 Initial thoughts on new MacBook Pro Apple MacBook Pro 09:23 How much RAM you might need 11:33 M1 Pro or M1 Max? 12:37 Justification as a business expense Figma Sketch We recently found that the new 2021 M1 MacBooks cut our Android build times in half. VS Code Microsoft releases M1-native Visual Studio Code for developing apps Notion Height Sublime Text 14:52 Shortening the feedback cycle 15:57 Using VS Code 21:20 Video editing on M1 MacBook Pro Mkbhd - M1 Macbook Pro review Synology Syntax.fm Ep220 The Synology Show Recut Davinci Resolve 24:27 Screenflow export comparison Screenflow 29:32 VS Code improvements SWC pnpm 32:57 The tools are no longer the bottleneck 33:37 Hardware upgrades 34:10 The notch Bartender 36:11 macOS icons have more padding 37:03 Charging and battery TS3 Plus 38:32 Fans and heat 39:18 Touch bar is gone 39:36 External displays 41:03 Battery 41:54 LG Display issue 42:51 Touch ID reader in a better spot 43:25 What's happening to your old MacBook Pro? 45:21 Ports and keyboards Tweet us your tasty treats Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

22 Nov 202147min

It’s another Potluck! In this episode, Scott and Wes answer your questions about GitHub Copilot, glasses, databases, dealing with stress, self-employment vs employment, design, CORS, and much more! Linode - Sponsor Whether you’re working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode’s Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with a $100 in free credit for listeners of Syntax. You can find all the details at linode.com/syntax. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/syntax and click on the “Create Free Account” button to get started. Sentry - Sponsor If you want to know what’s happening with your code, track errors and monitor performance with Sentry. Sentry’s Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health. Cut your time on error resolution from hours to minutes. It works with any language and integrates with dozens of other services. Syntax listeners new to Sentry can get two months for free by visiting Sentry.io and using the coupon code TASTYTREAT during sign up. Freshbooks - Sponsor Get a 30 day free trial of Freshbooks at freshbooks.com/syntax and put SYNTAX in the “How did you hear about us?” section. Show Notes 03:12 - Ders: Has GitHub Copilot become part of your daily workflow, or have you turned it off? 05:50 - Gaston Gmzi: Hey guys you rock!!! I’d like to know if you use eyeglasses and if you have any preference regarding models, design and features like blue-light blocking and anti-reflection. Also, where do you buy them? Do you go to a store to try them out, or do you buy them online? And if ordering online, which specifications do you use besides the doctor’s prescription? If you guys have any sick picks about eyeglasses it would be great to hear it too. Thanks for the show and have a great week!!! 11:04 - Hi, I would like to know how the two of you deal with stress? I am a freelancer and sometimes clients can get the worst in me. When they do, I usually take a long walk and listen to a podcast, but I don’t always have the time for that. I can actually go into my commit history and show which one was under stress. I think a lot of developers especially freelancers could benefit from that. Thanks. 16:47 - Mike Varela: Question for you guys about dynamic database fields and API requests. How do you let the user store dynamic metadata? Thanks. Love the show, avid listener. 21:04 - Valentine Michael Smith: Can you touch on the use of the word “grok” in the dev world? I know a lot of people who have no idea what this word means. I just happened to have tried to read Stranger in a Strange Land, the novel the word originated from, a few years ago or else I wouldn’t have ever heard it before starting dev work. Have either of you read the book? Anyways, why do devs say this? 24:50 - Steve Lewis: If you guys were not self-employed, would you prefer to work for a big company (like FAANG) or go to a smaller agency or startup, etc.? 27:08 - So Many Localhost Errors: This may be a softball, but how do you set up your logging (Sentry and/or LogRocket) so your dev environment isn’t firing all the time? I can’t seem to find a way to do this well (and it’s probably because I’m trying to learn as I go). 31:03 - Josh J from Jersey: Hey guys, loving the podcast, I’ve been listening for about a month but bingeing through your episodes during my mind-numbing warehouse job, helps me keep my mind on JavaScript and what I have managed to learn in my spare time. I was wondering, when you’re sitting down to a new project, how do you design the website? Does it just slowly develop as you code or have you sat down and drawn out what you want it to look like ahead of time? I have heard talk of a remarkable pad. I’ve seen ads for this on Instagram and YouTube but always assumed it was a very gimmicky thing. Is this a good investment? Also wondering how you both met? Have you worked on any projects together outside of courses and Syntax? Keep the content coming! 38:14 - Andras: Hi Wes and Scott. You have talked a lot on the show about headless CMS’s like Sanity, Prismic or even WordPress being used as a headless CMS. I am curious what the setup in a real world project is like. How would you host the CMS? And what will the admin surface look like? Will the button styles, background color etc. be different than the actual website that the end user sees? Is that a problem for the admin users? Does the admin user see all the menu for creating new content types or adding new features? Or do they only see the input fields of all the contents that can be added to a specific page? Thank you! 42:14 - Dave: Hey guys, love the podcast! I understand that CORS prevention is in place in the browser to help improve security/prevent malicious requests across domains, but I don’t understand why you can get around this by performing the request server side, for example via cURL? If I were a malicious actor, surely I could just send my cross domain request through a proxy to avoid the CORS issue? I’m sure I’m missing something obvious here, can I please get your thoughts on this? 44:48 - Lemon: How do you implement authentication with GraphQL? Especially in Fastify, I know Scott recently moved over from Meteor to Fastify, so I too was checking Fastify but couldn’t find a satisfying auth solution that fits well with GraphQL. 48:08 - Zack Vogel: I love when you play games on the podcast. I’m a high school technology teacher and I play a game with my students called the 5 Second Rule. It’s based on a board game, but I have changed the topics to technology-themed questions. The game works like this. One person reads a topic “Name Three VS Code Extensions” and the other person has five seconds to respond with three correct answers. I think this could be a fun game to play on the podcast. Links http://www.seeeyewear.com/ https://www.warbyparker.com/ https://www.costco.com/ MariaDB dynamic columns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok https://twitter.com/argyleink https://remarkable.com/ https://figma.com/ https://graphql.org/ https://www.meteor.com/ https://www.fastify.io/ https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1oRqz1rSUXiLc5pJF2cMygNrodcRrRU77x0KdWGV67Iw/edit?usp=sharing ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Scott: myQ Chamberlain Smart Garage Control Wes: ATOTO Head Unit Shameless Plugs Scott: Level Up Tutorials Pro - Sign up for the year and save 25%! Wes: All Courses - Use the coupon code ‘Syntax’ for $10 off! Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott’s Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes’ Instagram Wes’ Twitter Wes’ Facebook Scott’s Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

17 Nov 202157min

In this Hasty Treat, Scott and Wes talk about Next.js 12 and all of its hot new goodness and updates! Sanity - Sponsor Sanity.io is a real-time headless CMS with a fully customizable Content Studio built in React. Get a Sanity powered site up and running in minutes at sanity.io/create. Get an awesome supercharged free developer plan on sanity.io/syntax. LogRocket - Sponsor LogRocket lets you replay what users do on your site, helping you reproduce bugs and fix issues faster. It’s an exception tracker, a session re-player and a performance monitor. Get 14 days free at logrocket.com/syntax. Show Notes 04:00 - Rust Compiler: ~3x faster Fast Refresh and ~5x faster builds 06:25 - Middleware (beta): Enabling full flexibility in Next.js with code over configuration 08:16 - React 18 Support: Native Next.js APIs are now supported, as well as suspense 09:56 -  AVIF Support: Opt-in for 20% smaller images 11:58 - Bot-aware ISR Fallback: Optimized SEO for web crawlers 13:10 - Native ES Modules Support: Aligning with the standardized module system 14:39 - URL Imports (alpha): Import packages from any URL, no installs required Links https://twitter.com/mattgperry Introducing Middleware Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott’s Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes’ Instagram Wes’ Twitter Wes’ Facebook Scott’s Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

15 Nov 202117min

In this episode of Syntax, Scott and Wes talk with Tomek Sulkowski about web containers, StackBlitz and more! Freshbooks - Sponsor Get a 30 day free trial of Freshbooks at freshbooks.com/syntax and put SYNTAX in the “How did you hear about us?” section. LogRocket - Sponsor LogRocket lets you replay what users do on your site, helping you reproduce bugs and fix issues faster. It’s an exception tracker, a session re-player and a performance monitor. Get 14 days free at logrocket.com/syntax. Linode - Sponsor Whether you’re working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode’s Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with a $100 in free credit for listeners of Syntax. You can find all the details at linode.com/syntax. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/syntax and click on the “Create Free Account” button to get started. Guests Tomek Sulkowski Show Notes 02:45 - What is StackBlitz? 05:28 - What makes it different? 08:20 - How does offline work? 12:18 - What are web containers? How does this fit in? 17:45 - How does this all work (WASM, Node.js in the browser, etc.)? 21:00 - What does performance look like? 31:06 - What about VS Code extensions? 32:48 - Monorepos? 35:12 - Databases? Sqlite? 35:36 - Are there any limitations? 37:02 - What is Turbo? 40:58 - How is this different from similar apps? Links https://stackblitz.com/ https://jsbin.com/?html,output https://jsfiddle.net/ https://codepen.io/ https://code.visualstudio.com/ Fugu API Tracker (fugu-tracker.web.app) https://www.docker.com/ https://spidermonkey.dev/ https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore https://sli.dev/ https://vscode.dev/ https://codesandbox.io/ https://www.gitpod.io/ ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Scott: HaloLock Universal Ring Wes: Car LED Light Upgrade Tomek: The Dresden Files Shameless Plugs Scott: Astro Course - Sign up for the year and save 25%! Wes: All Courses - Use the coupon code ‘Syntax’ for $10 off! Tomek StackBlitz Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott’s Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes’ Instagram Wes’ Twitter Wes’ Facebook Scott’s Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

10 Nov 202155min

In this Hasty Treat, Scott and Wes talk about Astro — what it is and why you should check it out! Linode - Sponsor Whether you’re working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode’s Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with a $100 in free credit for listeners of Syntax. You can find all the details at linode.com/syntax. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/syntax and click on the “Create Free Account” button to get started. Sentry - Sponsor If you want to know what’s happening with your code, track errors and monitor performance with Sentry. Sentry’s Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health. Cut your time on error resolution from hours to minutes. It works with any language and integrates with dozens of other services. Syntax listeners new to Sentry can get two months for free by visiting Sentry.io and using the coupon code TASTYTREAT during sign up. Show Notes 03:08 - What is it, what does it do? Framework for server-first static apps Use any front-end framework Does not ship JS unless you explicitly define a component to ship JS 05:20 - The syntax .astro files is a mash-up of Svelte and React Frontmatter for server-side JS Template syntax is basically JSX TS baked in 07:48 - State management In client-side JS only, no state in .astro files 10:50 - CSS Svelte style Local, scoped tags SCSS baked in 11:16 - Data fetching Fetch in frontmatter via fetch() 12:06 - Vs React? Vs Next? Vs Gatsby? Vs Svelte? 15:24 - Tooling There is a Syntax highlighter Uses Snowpack under the hood Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott’s Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes’ Instagram Wes’ Twitter Wes’ Facebook Scott’s Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

8 Nov 202120min

In this episode of Syntax, Scott and Wes are back with another edition of “Stump’d!” where they try to stump each other with interview questions. Sanity - Sponsor Sanity.io is a real-time headless CMS with a fully customizable Content Studio built in React. Get a Sanity powered site up and running in minutes at sanity.io/create. Get an awesome supercharged free developer plan on sanity.io/syntax. Sentry - Sponsor If you want to know what’s happening with your code, track errors and monitor performance with Sentry. Sentry’s Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health. Cut your time on error resolution from hours to minutes. It works with any language and integrates with dozens of other services. Syntax listeners new to Sentry can get two months for free by visiting Sentry.io and using the coupon code TASTYTREAT during sign up. Cloudinary - Sponsor Cloudinary is the best way to manage images and videos in the cloud. Edit and transform for any use case, from performance to personalization, using Cloudinary’s APIs, SDKs, widgets, and integrations. Show Notes 06:05 - Which property allows you to control the shape or appearance of the marker of a list? 06:33 - What is a pseudo element? What is a pseudo class? 09:15 - What is the difference between block, inline and inline-block elements? 10:15 - What is a combinator selector? 11:12 - What is specificity? How do you calculate specificity? 14:37 - True or False — The translate() function can move the position of an element on the z-axis? 16:44 - What is the difference between “resetting” and “normalizing” CSS? 17:51 - How can you load CSS resources conditionally? 19:45 - Is there any reason you’d want to use translate() instead of absolute positioning, or vice-versa? 22:30 - When to use CSS grid vs flexbox? 25:12 - What are all eight @-rules in CSS? 28:01 - Which property is used to underline, overline, and strikethrough text? 29:52 - What is DOM reflow? 32:14 - How do you serve your pages for feature-constrained browsers? What techniques do you use? 34:00 - What is the property for controlling image-scroll? 36:23 - What are the three different types of CSS gradients? Links https://github.com/sudheerj/javascript-interview-questions https://github.com/learning-zone/css-interview-questions ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Scott: https://height.app/ Wes: Anker Mini Car Charger Shameless Plugs Scott: Astro Course - Sign up for the year and save 25%! Wes: Advanced React Course - Use the coupon code ‘Syntax’ for $10 off! Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott’s Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes’ Instagram Wes’ Twitter Wes’ Facebook Scott’s Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

3 Nov 202146min

In this Hasty Treat, Scott and Wes talk about PNPM and monorepos! Freshbooks - Sponsor Get a 30 day free trial of Freshbooks at freshbooks.com/syntax and put SYNTAX in the “How did you hear about us?” section. LogRocket - Sponsor LogRocket lets you replay what users do on your site, helping you reproduce bugs and fix issues faster. It’s an exception tracker, a session re-player and a performance monitor. Get 14 days free at logrocket.com/syntax. Show Notes 4:40 - What is pnpm? https://pnpm.io/ Performant npm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiTmX2dW84E Find and remove node modules find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune -exec rm -rf '{}' + 08:30 - Why monorepo? Internal packages all in one place Forks and custom packages easier Commands that control everything at once 10:33 - Workspaces Not exclusive to pnpm Yarn, npm, pnpm all have them now Different syntax packages: - "packages/**" 12:48 - How it works in practice All commands run through root Use in host, hook up my monorepo to render run commands Filter and recursive "install:all": "pnpm recursive install", "clean": "pnpm recursive exec -- rm -rf node_modules; rm shrinkwrap.yaml; rm -rf node_modules", "ui:dev": "pnpm recursive run dev --filter @leveluptuts/ui", 16:35 - Using submodules https://paigeniedringhaus.substack.com/p/march-2021-git-submodules Why submodules? Public and private Links https://www.npmjs.com/package/npx https://yarnpkg.com/ Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott’s Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes’ Instagram Wes’ Twitter Wes’ Facebook Scott’s Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

1 Nov 202122min

For episode 400, Scott and Wes talk about web dev horror stories - 2021 edition! LogRocket - Sponsor LogRocket lets you replay what users do on your site, helping you reproduce bugs and fix issues faster. It’s an exception tracker, a session re-player and a performance monitor. Get 14 days free at logrocket.com/syntax. Mux - Sponsor Mux Video is an API-first platform that makes it easy for any developer to build beautiful video. Powered by data and designed by video experts, your video will work perfectly on every device, every time. Mux Video handles storage, encoding, and delivery so you can focus on building your product. Live streaming is just as easy and Mux will scale with you as you grow, whether you’re serving a few dozen streams or a few million. Visit mux.com/syntax. Linode - Sponsor Whether you’re working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode’s Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with a $100 in free credit for listeners of Syntax. You can find all the details at linode.com/syntax. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/syntax and click on the “Create Free Account” button to get started. Show Notes 02:54 - Hi guys, love the show. I wanted to share with you something that happened just the other day (Oct 4th), I was starting my new job today at a large tech company. They use React for everything (even DNS!, don’t ask me how, it’s complicated). I figured I’d celebrate my first day and push some code to prod, (how hard could useEffect be right?) Next thing you know, they ended up bringing in a guy with an angle grinder to get access to the server cage. 04:15 - No one from Denver can buy 06:38 - Bug accidentally gives $90 million to users https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/01/defi-protocol-compound-mistakenly-gives-away-millions-to-users.html 08:34 - Share Pointy Knives Hi! I’m a developer at a consulting firm in Sweden, writing C# on the backend and using React with either JavaScript or TypeScript and hosting things in Azure 99% of the time (and 1% in SharePoint). I was in my last week at my last job before I was due to start my new job. Worked 12 h/day to keep up with all the handovers etc. to colleagues so they would have a chance to continue working on the solutions I have taken care of. One project was a process tool hosted in SharePoint Online. The guy who would oversee it had -1% experience with SharePoint (which I pointed out to my bosses). But to make things a bit easier, I wrote a deploy script to ease things a bit. Starts the terminal and runs the script towards the acceptance environment. Umpteen million errors appear… Which is strange, because there would only be about 20 commands (which can cause errors like these). I log into the environment to double check if I now accidentally entered the wrong values in the script (which looked okay according to me). But I get a 404 error when I try to reach the environment… I log into the admin interface; I discover that the site is gone… Also checking the trash can, there are no things there. Very strange. I find that I’m in a different folder than the one where I saved my script… In that folder there is an old deploy script that was used when the project was started a thousand years ago (which was not used after the project was “finished”). The first thing the script does is force delete the site and then try to create a new empty site… The site is gone with lists and everything (lists are a SharePoint thing, think of it as sql-lite), there are no backups of the acceptance environment (although it is very important). I just feel a little panicked about how I’m going to solve this. However, I remember testing a tool six months ago to copy entire environments. Where the first attempt was made on the acceptance environment. Finds the cloned environment and can use the same tool to clone it back. It took only 8-12 hours of work to create all the new things done in the environment in the last 6 months instead of X number of hours to build everything from scratch. Once I updated a feature that saves accessories on orders (same solution). However, I failed to add all the new fields to the production environment. Which meant that accessories were not saved at all… Which was discovered after a week… I fixed the error in 5 minutes and the sellers had to contact x number of customers to double check what kind of accessories they would have for their orders… 11:22 - External HD One time I needed to format a server. It was an outdated Windows server. I selected all the files and copied and pasted to an external hard drive. My drive was pretty fast and it took like a minute. I was like: “Wow! That’s a great external hd”. Formatted the server and, as soon as I realized it didn’t copy 10% of the files, I had that face. We all know that face. Anyways. Tried to restore the files using some HD recovery tools but they were all corrupted, not by the formatting itself but for the installation of the new OS. My boss was pissed! I was very young so I blame it on the server. I’m not proud of it. But why the heck they would ask a developer to format a server in the first place? By the way, my birthday is on Halloween. Spoooky. 13:07 - Hey Loser I was testing new code to automate mass-mailings to our customers. Who knows what demon drove me but I wrote the “test” mailings like ransom notes: “Dear loser! Fork over all your $$$ or else!” Well, all was looking great and I wa s feeling pretty pleased with myself. Progress bars were sliding and counters were spinning. But I could hear a rising commotion from the marketing guys behind me. Phones ringing, voices raised. Turns out I had moronically wired myself to the production database! Even worse for me, I’d only been at the company a month or two. I thought my goose was cooked and the Big Boss was plenty mad, but I owned up right away and apologized. We put out a cover story that we’d been hacked and all was forgiven. 15:01 - HE HATE ME I was part of the developer team that accidentally leaked the 8 cities the XFL, an alternate football league, a week before their press conference. ewrestling.com/article/wwe-ac… We were using Contentful and Gatsby. A junior dev entered the information into the prod space instead of the UAT space and when we released some bug fixes, it picked up the contact us content update. I found out after seeing stories pop up in Google News when I was about to go to sleep. Was taking the content down when we started getting calls from the CIO of the WWE. The league went bust because of COVID. 19:23 - I Don’t Have Memory of This I had two pretty bad code changes that only showed their problems when they went live in production. Around 6 years ago, I was running into a large performance issue with some of our queries running slowly against this giant DB. We were using JPA/Hibernate and we had a bunch of joins that were done lazily. I switched a few of them to eager so that they would create a single SQL statement instead of a bunch (or thousands). The change worked fine on my dev environment, QA, and staging. Staging was supposed to be representative of production. So we went live and within minutes the entire system went down because of out of memory errors. We quickly switched back to the lazy joins. We found out that staging had more memory and fewer DB records than production though they were supposed to be exactly the same. 21:05 - Your Performance is Slowing us down Back when VMWare was becoming a thing, like 2010 or so. I was working at an ecomm site and we were seeing slow performance between the app server and some data services. I decided to build a little multithreaded logger that could track when a query to Oracle Financials was running too slow and generate a warning. Oracle Financials was doing the credit card transactions, orders, and all the rest of the sites DB work. The code had no impact on my dev, QA, and staging environments. We were hitting well over our minimum number of concurrent users. We deployed it to production and then the system got slower and slower, but never crashed. Again, production and staging were set up differently. Staging was a bare-metal server. Production was running on an ESXi server on a host that was split 4 ways. The multi-threaded code meant to detect performance degradations was slowing the whole system down when it tried to synchronize data across threads. I was pretty embarrassed by both these two issues. It went to show that production is its own special thing and that you really don’t know if your server-side code is really going to work until it starts running there. 23:15 - Dead Button Way back when mainframes were king, a guy I worked with pushed a button in, that if released, would immediately take down the entire company. He stood there for 4 hours, holding the button in, until we could let it crash after business hours. We gave him a chair after 2 hours. 25:12 - No Deploys on Fridays I was a junior dev working on our company’s website. They were HTML + nunjucks templates that were later being integrated with the backend using some Python witchcraft. There was also a metric ton of JS libraries added (like Babra for page transitions, threejs for a cool interactive animation on the landing page etc.). Didn’t really get much of all this package.json stuff at that seniority level. So after running yarn or npm or whatever, and seeing some warnings about a couple packages being outdated, I decided to update some of them. It ran great locally, but I didn’t build the prod version, as I didn’t know there could be any differences. I was working on some minor feature (or maybe even some minor bug) and the PM decided there’s no time for code review. So I pushed it to the repo, the backend guy did his integration, and launched it on prod. As it turned out, there were some breaking changes in one of the libraries I decided to update. It crashed the entire site. On Friday. At 4:30PM. And that, kids, is why you don’t deploy on Fridays. 27:33 - Stupid Selfie Horror story for you Wes. I work for one of the biggest retailers in the UK and we were working on an app that would go on a ‘media wall’ in their flagship store in London. Basically a giant 200-inch screen in the middle of the store that social content can go on. Turns out that I left my local Dev version connected to the production API when I uploaded a couple of stupid selfies of my big head in the office. Get a call the next day to ask why my face is on the medial wall. 28:37 - Soda I was a computer operator back in the late 1960’s, operating a Honeywell mainframe. The consoles were huge, about the size of a dishwashing machine, with the console typewriter and printer inset in the middle, on top. I had a soft drink on the console, next to the typewriter mechanism. We were told never to bring a drink into the room but we all did it, especially on third shift. Long story short, someone called my name, I turned around and knocked the glass of soda into the console. Had to be completely replaced – machine was down for two days. My boss was not happy. 31:22 - Oof A bigger horror story. I had my own software company in the 90’s and was in Singapore, customizing my software package for Johnson & Higgins Insurance Brokers – I had their Asian contract for my Insurance Broker/Accounting package. I spent a good 40 hours on Saturday and Sunday, making all the changes they asked for, getting ready for a demo on Monday morning. I finished up about 4am on Monday morning and was cleaning up my files. All this work was done on a Novell server. Print files had an extension of .prt and I had a ton of them in the main directory from all of the testing I had done. I was cleaning out old files, getting ready to back everything up and I thought I would delete all of the print files. I mistakenly keyed in erase *.prg, instead of erase *.prt (or whatever the delete command was – can’t remember it now). Programming files have a .prg extension – I had deleted all of my updated files from the weekend. In desperation I called Novell in Utah, hoping they could help me recover the files, but no-go. The demo Monday morning was not fun. 33:24 - Young Dev I was a young dev right out of college. My first job was at a child support company where we had desktop apps that would handle case information more efficiently than using Excel. My first project was to write a POC that would later be implemented into a new, bigger app that consolidated all the “POCs” for various parts of the child support process. For some odd reason, I still don’t know why to this day, my boss wanted me to write this “new” app on top of an old app with a bunch of legacy code. I never understood why but as a young dev fresh out of school, you tend to just do what you’re told. In school, I mainly used PHP/HTML/CSS for learning how to work with a database; this job however used C#/.NET for their desktop apps so I was doing a lot of learning as I went. I remember finally learning how to connect to the database and run some SQL after fighting with this old pile of legacy code. In early versions, I chose to handle creates/updates for these records in the same function. My young, dumb self wrote a try catch statement that would attempt to create the record and if it failed, it would try to update the record. Before the first production release, I updated the flow to handle creates/updates in separate functions - but never removed the update in the catch block of the original function now used for creates only. Somehow I, or any PM/QA, never failed on a create and hit this catch block while testing. Fast-forward probably 9-12 months later, I got a ticket to investigate why every case’s data looked the same in Production. I login to the app, search a few case numbers and sure enough, every case’s data is the same. I began freaking out as I had no clue how this could’ve happened. I mean it had never happened in all the dev work, testing, and months of live Production use. After I investigated with a senior dev, we realized the try block had failed and the update query in the catch block ran for that record - we also realized that I left off the where clause in the related SQL query to specify which record needs updating - so ALL records got updated with this data. Thankfully, we kept regular back-ups and were able to restore the data to a recent timeframe without users losing a ton of work. We commented out that database update call and redeployed the code ASAP. Also the senior dev was cool about it and was like “hey, it happens to all of us at some point”. Let’s just say I’ve learned a ton since then and definitely steer clear from writing code like that. You live and you learn I suppose. 38:40 - Where Wolf Here’s my development tale of terror: One night I was burning the midnight oil trying to get caught up on a never-ending workload. At the time I was working for an online travel booking site. It was after 11, and the last thing I had to do for the night was to rename one of the hotels in our production database. So I wrote my query: UPDATE hotels SET name=‘Some Hotel Chain’; One problem, I FORGOT THE WHERE CLAUSE. Suddenly, over 5,000 hotels in our production database all had the same name. This was around 2003, so well before the time of point-in-time restores, and we were only backing up the database every week at that point. I was panicking. Fortunately, I had a dump of the production database that I had created only a couple of hours earlier sitting on my local hard drive. So thankfully, I was able to restore almost all of the hotel names, save for a couple that signed up after that data dump, and my boss was none the wiser. That’s when I learned that working late hours is not worth it, because at some point you are so tired that you can no longer make good decisions. 41:19 - I Want Your Job When I first started out I worked for a consultancy and they trained us in sales meetings to help managers get promoted because we were coming in to make them “look good”. This was okay b/c obviously, we were coming in as a contractor; however, after being laid off due to 9/11 (yes, this was about 20 years ago), I was looking for a new job and during an interview when asked where I’d like to be in X years, I mentioned to the hiring manager that I wanted to eventually do what he was doing. Well, I guess he didn’t take it that I wanted to make him get promoted to then take his spot. Safe to say I didn’t get hired. 🤦‍♂️😜 ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Scott: Portable Air Compressor Wes: ESR Magnet Phone Mount Shameless Plugs Scott: Latest courses on Prisma and Astro - Sign up for the year and save 25%! Wes: Advanced React - Use the coupon code ‘Syntax’ for $10 off! Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott’s Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes’ Instagram Wes’ Twitter Wes’ Facebook Scott’s Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

27 Okt 202151min