Be me, new dev on a team. Taking a look through source code to get up to speed.

Dev: **thinking to self** why is there no package lock.. let me bring this up to boss man

Dev: hey boss man, you’ve got no package lock, did we forget to commit it?

Manager: no I don’t like package locks.

Dev: ...why?

Manager: they fuck up computer. The project never ran with a package lock.

Dev: ..how will you make sure that every dev has the same packages while developing?

Manager: don’t worry, I’ve done this before, we haven’t had any issues.

**couple weeks goes by**

Dev: pushes code

Manager: hey your feature is not working on my machine

Dev: it’s working on mine, and the dev servers. Let’s take a look and see

**finds out he deletes his package lock every time he does npm install, so therefore he literally has the latest of like a 50 packages with no testing**

Dev: well you see you have some packages here that updates, and have broken some of the features.

Manager: >=|, fix it.

Dev: commit a working package lock so we’re all on the same.

Manager: just set the package version to whatever works.

Dev: okay

**more weeks go by**

Manager: why are we having so many issues between devs, why are things working on some computers and not others??? We can’t be having this it’s wasting time.

Dev: **takes a look at everyone’s packages** we all have different packages.

Manager: that’s it, no one can use Mac computers. You must use these windows computers, and you must install npm v6.0 and node v15.11. Everyone must have the same system and software install to guarantee we’re all on the same page

Dev: so can we also commit package lock so we’re all having the same packages as well?

Manager: No, package locks don’t work.

**few days go by**

Manager: GUYS WHY IS THE CODE DEPLOYING TO PRODUCTION NOT WORKING. IT WAS WORKING IN DEV

DEV: **looks at packages**, when the project was built on dev on 9/1 package x was on version 1.1, when it was approved and moved to prod on 9/3 package x was now on version 1.2 which was a change that broke our code.

Manager: CHANGE THE DEPLOYMENT SCRIPTS THEN. MAKE PROD RSYNC NODE_MODULES WITH DEV

Dev: okay

Manager: just trust me, I’ve been doing this for years

Who the fuck put this man in charge.

Developing a notification API, sends emails to subscribers, email API can take only 100 IDs at once, so partitioned the email list and send mails in blocks of 100.

Forgot to reset the list after every block, so each new partition got appended to the existing list and kept going on.

Ran it against a test DB, which was recently refreshed with near-prod data !!! Thousands of emails went out of the app server in one shot and everybody receiving numerous duplicate emails. Especially the ones in the very first partition.

Got an incident raised by the CEO himself reg the flurry of emails. But, things were out of our hands, quite literally. All emails are queued up in the exchange server.

Called up the exchange server team, purged​ the queued emails. No other emails were sent/received during this whole episode.

Thanks to Iterables.partition in the present day.

New normal. New app to build.

- Still have to maintain older systems in parallel
- That leaves 1 week for developing the new app
- Slept 2 hours a day, coding coding coding
- Tested the shit out of the app because.. hey, its to help the customers' safety and health... I don't mind staying up late
- Finished the app in 5 days, code is now on prod
- Could barely look myself at the mirror because I look like shit
- Btw the app requires an external device as an input, the existing device works flawlessly based on my testing
- We need more devices
- Clueless manager bought new model instead. He assumed everything is fine, no testing is required
- Tested the app with new device model, doesn't work
- Deadline closing in
- Thanks, there goes my sleep
- THANK YOU

The mobile application my company is developing is beginning to fail in a prod environment because the third party tool we purchased to sync our 3 databases in the background isn't working as expected, so I have been assigned the task of rewriting the entire application. I chose to do it in react-native/redux which I have never heard of until two weeks ago, and I have never enjoyed programming so much in my life. Shit just clicks and works the first time more often than not. Android Studio had me banging my head against my desk daily. Kudos to these technologies 👌