I am a software engineer.
I live in the UK and currently work for DeviantArt.
This blog lets me vent some of the tech junk that is always on my mind. If it does nothing else
I consider it a courtesey to my wife.
You should note the date on anything you read here. There are things written here in the past that I leave for historical purposes rather than because they remain accurate or even consistent with my current opinions.
In case it's not obvious, this is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.
Ooops! Github was down yesterday for several hours and I was expecting one of those "some complex as-yet-unidentified quirk of replication caused our sharded NoSQL cluster to drop every record with exactly 13 words in the title" type incident reports. Turns out a developer just deleted their production DB accidentally.
Fair play to them for the honest post though. This sort of thing does happen to everyone to a lesser or greater extent and I feel for the guy responsible. It does go to show though that Continuous Integration, Test Driven Development, Rails and all the other associated buzzwords don't always save you from the inevitable!
Lesson to learn: don't allow write access to production databases from dev environments. I'd have thought that with all their infrastructure and expertise, that should never have happened.