Our client decided to save some $$. At the end of each business day teams downscale their environments before leaving and the next day scale them up in the morning to start working.

The idea is not bad, but they are a bit too ignorant to the fact that some environments are exceeding AWS APIs limits already (huge, HUGE accounts, huge environments, each env easily exceeding /26 netmask, not even taking containers into account). Sooo... scaling up might take a while. Take today for example:

- come in to the office at 7
- start scaling up
- have lunch
- ~15:00 scaleup has finished
- one component is not working, escalating respective folks to fix them
- ~17:00 env is ready for work
- 17:01 initiate scaledown process and go home

Sounds like a hell of a productive day!!!

it's easier for me to build my cv on a website than arrange a normal paper/pdf one.

This is my frontend tip of the day.
If you have a frontend that consumes an external API:
1) Retrieve the json responses from devtools
2) Save them in your project as json files (trim the data a bit if it's too long)
3) When starting your app with a special env var like MOCK_DATA, make your app mock the data and use your saved json data instead.

You can associate each response with an url regex.

The package fetch-mock mocks fetch really well, it lets through the urls that don't match anything.
This way you can incrementally add responses.

And voila, you have a mode where you have near instant page loads to test things manually, and you also have mocked data ready for testing eg, cypress.

“Please don't use Google docs in the [redacted] env--it is not allowed at all and we will get dinged. You should all have MS Office so please save important artifacts in an approved format.” —Said someone being bribed by Microsoft

I work in a small team. As the senior dev I tens to focus on important tasks that shape the core of the product but some times I can’t divide my self when there are multiple tasks at hand, so I pass some tasks to the an other mid level dev.

So the task was to create an automation in order to CD (continuously deliver) an order from WHMCS of the (git versioned) product to customers UAT, PROD envs.

To get a background this is an old guy with “constricted” experience in PHP/jQuery/Joomla/Wordpress.

So when we were breaking up the tasks he told me he would like to implement this so i gave him the task as i was busy with core features.

I was like what could go wrong? I know he doesn’t know much about CI/CD but he can read right? He will google right? He will search for CI/CD solutions that do this out of the box right? He will design on paper or what ever and do small POCs right? He will design the flow first before starting the implementation right? RIGHT?

So fast forward to today I had a call with him this morning about some DB staff. And he wanted to show me his progress…

His solution is:
(parentheses is my brain)
1. Customer completes WHMCS order (perfect)
2. Web Hook 🪝 action (YES)
3. cpanel gets source and “automatic!” Init, all using pure PHP code ignoring the usage of the current framework (ok… something is missing)
4. cpanel web hooks(?) WHMCS to send email to customer with the envs initial setup page(?)
5. Customer opens link and adds setup info (ok fuck, fuck, fuck)

(Ok stay cool composed, lets ask some questions maybe he thought it all in a cool way I can’t get my mind around)

Me: So how are you gonna get the correct version from the repo to the env and init the correct schema?

Dev: I haven’t thought about it yet.

Me: Are we gonna save each version to a file system then your code is going to fetch them?

Dev: I haven’t really thought about it we will see. But look on customer init user setup I implemented a password strength validation and it also checks if the password is the same.

So after this Pokémon encounter I politely closed teams. Stood up drank some (a lot) coffee ☕️. Put out the washed laundry while reflecting on life’s good things, while listening to classical music 🎼 .

Then I sat on my office chair drank some more coffee, put some linking park starting with in that order:
“Numb” then “What I’ve Done” and ended with “In the end, it does really fucking matter”