this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
545 points (98.7% liked)

Programmer Humor

32874 readers
1100 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
top 36 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 73 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (5 children)

As a data engineer, testing with production loads is critical to performance checking, as well as finding edge cases where your assumptions about what can be expected in the data are curb stomped and send you back to the drawing board to cry and think about what you've done.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Yeah we finally set up a workflow where we get production data available in a staging environment. This has saved a lot of trouble via "well it worked on my local where there were 100 records, but prod has 1037492 and it does not"

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Same. Early on as a new dev, I failed to performance check my script (as did my qa tester) before it was released to production, and that was my first roll back ever. It was very unoptimized and incredibly slow under one of our highest density data streams. Felt like an idiot that I was good with it's 1-2 second execution time in the dev environment.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago

I learned about this in my first internship, bless the senior Dev that showed be proper ways to build actual SQL

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

I deal with this constantly. Profilers are your friend. I keep begging my team to use the database dumps from production to test with, but nope. Don't feel bad about messing up though. The amount of fuck ups I deal with in prod is exasperating. At least most of the things I break is a quick 5 minute fix and not weeks of rework.

The hardest thing I have explaining to the team is the concept of time. Once you have done controls programming and get to witness how much happens in 50-100ms, it sinks in. Your thing takes 500ms? 1 second? They think this is acceptable on something that is dealing with less than 100 database records. 😭

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I once tanked a production service by assuming it could handle at least as much load as my laptop on residential sub-gigabit Internet could produce.

I was wrong by at least an order of magnitude.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 days ago (1 children)

17 years working with hospital patient data. I'm going to curl up in a corner and cry now...

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 days ago

dev teams usually :

What's the worst that could happen,people won't die

this guy :

17 years working with hospital patient data

must be high pressure work.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago (2 children)

And then managers that don't get this will try to shove policies down our throats about how "pre-prod systems should not have access to prod data".

"just obfuscate it." Sure, for all 300Tb of it from the 10 different sources that don't really talk to each other and we were already doing magic to be able to join them together? They should give us a bottle of hard liquor per month/project.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

As one of the devops/sysadmin types, if we give access to prod data to preprod systems, they are now in audit scope and you have to harden them or we lose our insurance and compliance certs.

Obviously the solution is to build some system where everything works out, but it's not as easy as "just give root to devs".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Yup. Regulatory and audit requirements are a motherfucker.

Also, I don't mean to speak down to devs, but as a rule of thumb you tend to think far higher of your skills just because you know the building blocks. Being able to build a boat doesn't mean you know how to sail.

I know multiple people who are prodigous developers but know jack shit about basic computer usage and security. People who had to be guided to the control panel in Windows. Yes, even after they added the search bar. People hired to work in an exclusively Windows enterprise environment.

Now add that amount of potential that lack of basic operational skill carries for fucking things up to the least competent (or at minimum the least careful) co-worker on your dev team.

You (any dev reading this) as an individual would probably never fuck up that badly. You (any dev reading this) would probably do everything right, correct, and wouldn't cause problems with root. But the rules aren't written to protect against the competent, or against people never making mistakes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

You misspelled gallon(s).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

Heh, loads.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You test in dev? You mean you don't have a Q&A environment? or staging?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I test my own code/scripts in dev when I'm working on it. QA usually tests acceptance criteria in test environment. And then staging is used for production data testing for performance and identifying missed edge cases. Actually, we sometimes use dev and test interchangeably when multiple people are working on the same repo, so the lines are a little blurrier than that.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 days ago

That's why we have 4 environments, development, test, pre-production and production.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Jeez bud just laugh at the meme for fucks sake

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

A coworker once got an HR talking-to for printing this meme out and leaving it on all the dev's desks.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Regardless of the meme, it's just weird behaviour to print off a meme, in presumably tens of copies, and leave it on every desk. Don't you have a group chat?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I’ve definitely had the experience of something being broken in Prod… and no one can reproduce it in Dev.

Guess where we are fixing it!?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

Reminds me of this old aeronautical joke. Context is a plane maintenance log.

Plane grounded, airspeed indicator inaccurate above 500 kts. (Signature of the pilot)

Plane airworthy, could not reproduce issue on the ground. (Signature of mechanic)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 days ago

That’s why it helps to have a staging environment as well.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago

"as above, so below"

If your test and prod are different, you need to ensure your manager understands the risks you will not magically account for. It's on their head when it fucks up.

Testing in prod requires its own separate indemnification because that's also only ever after direct orders.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago

I have three setups DEV: an environment that is almost useless thanks to how many changes have to be made between production and the development environment.

TEST: A More useful exact cloan of production that you still have to edit specific things but it is usually the same each time.

PROD: this one just never works right.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

Test only on dev hardware because production hardware is too expensive to waste on developers. No idea why the software runs better on dev hardware than production. They're kind of similar.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

Yall don't use the consumers as the test. It saves 60% of upfront costs!

Remember to buy "Aunty's Cleo It's Better than nature!"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

Testing is a sign of weakness.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

I prefer camel case

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

My customer does this bullshit. Every time: "We can't deploy that necessary/required update because we haven't tested it yet. Also, we have no testing environment and we need that update to fix a serious problem. This is all your fault."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

Sounds like a fun project

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago