A couple weeks ago I accidentally replaced our live, production database with a 17-hour old snapshot.
I had intended to target a test server, not production. I didn’t realize what I had done for an hour or so, and by that time I had already left work. (I was actually out walking my dog. Not a good setting for managing a production crisis.)
Here’s how my team and I handled it.
You could say Z-80 assembly language is what really turned me into a software developer.
My first programming language was BASIC, which was built into my first computer (a TRS-80 Model III). I wrote a lot of BASIC code, including arcade-style games (compiled BASIC — you can still play them on this TRS-80 Model III Emulator).
I always wanted to keep learning. There was no World Wide Web for research and nobody I knew could guide me, so we went to Radio Shack and asked them how else I could program the computer. They sold us the Editor/Assember package.
(I recently posted this on Quora in response to a question along the lines of “Engineers, when did you decide to study Computer Science?”)
I have been a full-time software engineer for the last 7 years, and a part-time one for ten years before that.
I have never formally studied computer science.
It wasn’t an option before college (small high school in rural Vermont). And at the otherwise excellent small liberal arts college I attended, it wasn’t one of the available majors.
(Note: This is a writeup I did a few years ago when evaluating Riak KV as a possible data store for a high-traffic CMS. At the time, the product was called simply “Riak”. Naturally, other details may be out of date as well.)
Riak is a distributed, key/value store written in Erlang. It is open source but supported by a commercial company, Basho.
Its design is based on an Amazon creation called Dynamo, which is described in a 200-page paper published by Amazon. The engineers at Basho used this paper to guide the design of Riak.
Non-engineers want to know: what happens when a big bug is found in your software, and the bug is causing real users real problems, and you’re the one who wrote the code?
Engineers do sometimes write bad code, and sometimes it makes it into production, it’s true.
But shipping production software involves a lot more than writing code. It goes beyond that one engineer. That engineer is not the only person who saw or ran that code.