Slashdot Mirror
Monday, The Death of Websites
An anonymous reader writes "Developers implementing 'weekend inspiration' are more dangerous than hackers.
Vnunet.com has this article about how eager developers and administrators create more troubles than hackers and viruses do for websites. How about those of us who start the week with a cup of coffee and the morning online-news? My inspiration and new ideas for development are definitely not the cause of the Monday-crash hour ... I think."
You all died? Where are all the posts?
Does this mean I shouldn't expect anymore karma?
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
And if slashdotting causes more downtime than developer mistakes, couldn't one argue that interesting content is more harmful than bad code for website uptime?
Quack!Quack!.....QUACK!!
Has anyone done any sort of bandwidth study looking at sites like etrade and yahoo, for purposes of determining any correlation between bandwidth consumption and movement on the stock markets? Intuition says that Monday mornings ought to see some sort of correlated spike.
I log in, the story is a few hours old, and there are 4 posts. Slashdot implementing the theory?
Ok, I give up, why you?
The article suggests that developers come back from their weekends and start fiddling with websites, but I think this last paragraph is perhaps equally or more accurate. Managers get "inspired" over the weekend just as much as code writers.
Reminds me of the BBS days. Usually a few hours after the SysOp leaves on vacation, the BBS is guaranteed to go down.
This is nothing but unprofessional development - the old "Oh, this is soooo good and sooo simple, how can it possibly cause troub..... ".
/. crew this: while their spelling may be atrocious, their grasp of grammer poor, and their fact and dup checking next to non-existent, they will put major changes to the codebase into Banjo first, then after they've been abused put them into the main /. site.
Any codebase, be it a program, a web site, or a router's firewall rules, should be changed IN TEST FIRST! Then you do your best to break it, and only after you and several others have had at it do you move it to production/HEAD/whatever (and hold your breath).
If you had a wonderful idea over the weekend, GREAT! Implement it in a test branch, try it out, and then move it to production. But if you merge it into the mainline without testing you are not acting professionally.
I will give the
At least, some of the time.
www.eFax.com are spammers
OMFG I broke teh Intarweb this morning!
IAALS.
In any properly managed environment, developers don't get to [i]touch[/i] the production environment. If they do, it should be read-only. All changes are made in the dev environment (developers can do what they want), put into test (developers are seriously limited), and then finally into production. Prod should be a physically separate set of servers from dev & test.
If stuff breaks on Mondays, either someone is skipping steps, or there is more going on.
My server
Sounds alot more like lack of a proper devlopment environment to me.
I mean its easy for it to happen. We had problems like this with our monitoring system (tho it was manic friday where someone would attemtp to impliment something before the weekend because of course, the weekend is when you want pages the least so you want to get anything that causes false pages fixed on friday to maximize enjoyment of the weekend)
Now we have development and test servers where things live BEFORE they go production. I never had any idea that it would help so much until we finnaly implimented it.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I guess these sites don't test anyting. Maybe they are talking about small sites. I work for a big car company. We have three stages of testing.
:-)
I'm not saying the artical is wrong. The developers are still the biggest problem with our web site. It just doesn't always happen on Monday. Some times it takes tell Wednesday to get through the system.
There are 10 type of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Just a thought: The rest of the world lumps all of us IT people together; the distinction between, say, a "developer" and "sysadmin" means nothing to my non-geek friends.
I don't think stuff like this happens often to sysadmins or DBAs. How often do you come into work on a monday and decide to migrate to xfs because you read on slashdot over the weekend that SGI ported it to linux, and SGI is cool? Likewise, how often does an Oracle DBA decide on Monday to move some production tablespaces over to rawfs from cooked, because she read a whitepaper from Oracle on Saturday that talked about performance increases from raw filesystems?
I've written a lot of code, and also sysadmin'd an awful lot of servers, and in my experience probably 90% of "production outages" are software changes--exactly like the article said--poor change control, etc etc. So, what's the point of dynamic multipathing, patching, dual power supplies, etc etc, when most problems occur because someone got excited and forgot a semicolon somewhere?
Is it fair to say that sysadmins fix things and developers break them? What is different about a software engineer's brain than a systems engineers? Talk amongst yourselves :)
or do those developers need to possibly develop on a copy of the website not accessible to the public? I mean, it's not hat hard to hit cp -R and transfer your updated functioning website to the primary directory...Maybe I'm the only one that doesn't tinker with things that people are hitting as I type.
On retail and B2B sites, Monday is usually a busy day. Customers are rolling into their offices with articles to read, facts to research and stuff to buy. Out of the seven days of the week, it'd be the worst for making a change.
On the other hand, I'm not sure incremental development is that much worse than large releases. You're either releasing a bug or two a week or waiting eight weeks to release all your bugs at one time.
The tone of the article talks about shoot-from-the-hip developers acting irresponsibly, on impulse. They're taking a recognized and thoughtful practice and painting it as irresponsibility.
Monday is the best time to implement changes to most sites. The irresponsible coder implements on Friday, when errors might not be caught, or fixed, until the next working day, after a full weekend of downtime, bugginess, or insecure behavior.
But that wouldn't make for an interesting story. News flash: updating code often results in bugs that need to be fixed. When do the authors suggest we roll out new versions?
Kevin Fox
i tend to spend the weekend trying to think of excuses to avoid doing any work on monday morning, somehow i figured other people did the same thing
p.s. our website hasn't gone down in 2 years, go figure
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
While working for a large nameless Telecoms Company,
I and my fellow Contractors had an unwritten rule to "hold off" on all "good" ideas generated in meetings etc on Monday & Friday. Almost inevitably they would
all be canceled within a couple of days. Not subjecting ourselves to post/pre weekend madness saved ourselves a ton of work and helped us bring the project in on time!!
They talk as if the developer has an idea over the weekend, then comes in Monday morning and implements this idea without any testing. But if that were true, the websites would crash Tuesday. I mean, really, how many of you think these guys are really making the changes Monday morning and the websites are thus breaking Monday morning? Any changes you see Monday morning were loaded over the weekend, and are probably the result of all last-week's work. Whatever ideas anyone got over the weekend will be coded and tested this week and installed next weekend; they won't show up until next Monday at the earliest.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Log in.
Cup of coffee.
Browse online forums.
Read witty remark.
C|N>K
Change keyboard. Curse profusely.
Stéphane "Alias" Gallay
Now, where did I put this witty quote?..
I, as IT director, would fire my IT staff if they pulled this. Considering that I have some systems with uptimes in YEARS, a few going on a DECADE, and over-all the _entire_ network has worked 24x7 for the last 10 years. Our business operations isn't even Internet based (we just happen to use it -- primarily for email) and the operations of the systems isn't life-critical. We just like our computers/networks to work.
Of course I'm the one that implemented a testing domain (live on the Net) for just such purposes. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER "test" anything on a production system. I can't even think of any installations that were not tested for MONTHS "offline" before being implemented. When the day comes to install there usually aren't any shockers either. It just works.
Of course I'm the one that's NEVER allowed a Windows server to even be a consideration. "Are you NUTS?"
I'm going to start with pointing out that the first sentence of the article said "UK websites", not "US". Obviously that means the people across the Pond need to work on this.
And what a surprise that when people roll out changes sometimes things break. Oh My God. Have you cured cancer yet?
And I'd say more often than not the "problems" on Monday are caused by bug fixes that developers are rushing on to production to fix bugs that were found over the weekend. And, as we all know, sometimes bug fixes skip QA...
Seriously, most places I work have Go Live set to be Monday, or, more often, Tuesday. You go live when you have already tested it; its gone through QA; and you're sure the staff is there. Tuesday is the better date in order to deal with key people taking long weekends, and it gives you two or three days to fix issues before the next weekend. Besides, Mondays are already hellish without adding "release new version" to the list of torments.
Seems to me we are talking about several different things here.
First of all, presumably it is a good thing that people think, and get inspiration. Mon-Fri 9-5 is not the best time for thinking - this is the time for meeting deadlines, sitting in meetings, answering the phone, putting out fires, and so on. The only time most of us have to actually sit and think is the weekend. Personally, I think that should be encouraged.
The next step is implmenting what you have dreamt up. Obviously, most ideas fail - ask any patent officer. And obviulsly, implmenting a new idea without checking with colleagues, drawing it 0ut in a spec, getting that spec approved, then protoyping, testing, tuning is not ideal either. These procedures were invented for good reasons - not just to constrain the creative mind. This is where most developers fail - not in coming up with ideas, but in being disiplined in implmenting them. I hear "we cannot plan ahead, it does not work like that for us" all the time from my developers - this is always a misconception, and seems to me simply a combination of inexperience, laziness and inability... nothing that cannot be fixed!
Michael
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
Sheesh, next thing you know they'll start spouting nonsense like "burning the midnight oil leads to more bugs."
When I was responsible for the Internet site of a rather large national bank, we only accepted change requests for Tuesday and Thursday mornings. It was just easier for the operators to get hold of a sober developer/administrator at 02:00 on a Tuesday or a Thursday than any other time. And getting a contact on the business side to ok a rollback that caused contract issues on the weekend was near impossible.
It doesn't matter if the website was made on saturday , or wensday. anytime a website comes out with new code, its going to fuck up in the first few days. there is just no cheap way to test a website with a full load of users all with difrent OS's, web browsers, and connections. how many times has slashdot craped out when they update the slashcode
Having been working on a company that grew from a 1999 Internet startup with 5 employees (me being the only programmer to work along two consultants) to a profitable Internet company with 40 employees in 2003 (inlcuding the two former consultants), I've seen quite a bit of change in the IT procedures.
:-(
We have an 8 people tech team now (manager, programmers, support, QA). Whereas before we programmers would just use a development environment somewhat similar to the production (live) environment, test it a bit, deploy at will and monitor if anything went wrong, things have progressed a lot. Now we develop on a development environment as close to the production one as possible, then this is released to a test environment (also as close as possible to the production one) to be tested by QA, and that is finally released on the production (live) environment after it all tests ok (including regression testing).
Moreover, all the code changes are now under CVS, and we have automatic tools for monitoring the site, emailing errors, etc. QA is also done by separate people. IMHO it is conceptually flawed to allow the developers to do the final testing, by definition. (Though of course this is not always possible for cost reasons, it should be a goal).
The quality of our site is much better now. Problems almost always only arise when people want to bypass QA or force things through for emergencies.
IMHO, what is needed is:
1. Professionalism by the developers.
2. Testing, testing, and testing -- by the developers.
3. QA, QA and QA -- by someone other than the developers!
4. Managers must know the test/ QA process should never by bypassed -- this unfortunately is probably the hardest point.
I taught a couple of ecommerce classes for MBA students and had them actually do hands on development (in a limited sense of course) so they could get an appreciation of this process. Hopefully if some of them are managers they will remember that and not try to shortcut the due process.
/* TAANSTAFL */
.. Have never defaced my site with the goatse guy nor deleted critical files. They may not work great at first (or at all) but they're in no way malicious. More dangerous than hackers or virii? I think not.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
"Looks like someone has a case of the Mooondays"
There must be a course somewhere for developers - how to piss-off sysadmins. Highlights:
1. Make changes last thing on a Friday.
2. Or before a 2 week holiday
3. Change Management does not apply to developers
4. CVS is for wimps
5. And if you must use CVS, wait a week before committing fixed code.
5. Don't bump version numbers
6. Don't update init scripts
7. Ecept if they are correct
8. If anyome is aware of what you are upto... go to lunch.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
When you make changes to websites, they sometimes break. Anytime you introduce change into a stable system, you open the door for instability.
And generally business websites don't see as much traffic on the weekends, so naturally the weekend is the time to make changes.
So wow, it's no shock that Mondays are when you're most likely to see problems with a website. But these problems and hiccups are the price you pay for progress.
If you don't want to chance any disruption in your life, then I guess you should never change. Otherwise, get over it.
You need to get the code monkey off the production box.
They need a Dev environment. And THAT's ALL they touch. They deliver their code to UAT.
QA needs 2 environments:
- Unit Acceptence testing (UAT) and all bugs go back to Dev
- Integration Testing (IT) and all bugs back to Dev or you need SysAdmins who need to hack the OS middleware &| environment)
Production where NOHING is allowed until its gone through UAT & IT.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
You mean, other companies' web programmers get to take weekends?!? Man, that must be nice...
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Lawrence: No. No, man. Shit, no man. I believe you'd get your ass kicked saying something like that.
Desktop applications sucked because the developers were smart and the users were stupid.
Web applications suck because the developers are stupid and the users are smart.
Solution: have the desktop developers design web sites and fire the webdevs! I mean, I've been waiting WAY to long for a boss key on e2, anyway.
Is this really a case of "Weekend Inspiration", or a case of management pushing changes that haven't been thouroughly tested?
I find it quite disturbing how these companies are blaming downtime on developers. This means that:
a. You have no change control over your environment, and developers can do as they please, hence poor management.
b. Developers are implementing changes that haven't been thouroughly tested. Again poor management.
Technology and competition isn't moving so quickly that you cannot take the time to use a test/qa environment.
Awesome!
What kind of mickey-mouse operation is it that allows someone's (whether management or developer) mistake to take down their web site? Have they heard of QA and testing? You'd have to be insane to allow any changes to a production system without it being tested on the test system first. In all the places I've worked at (I'm a back-end hacker, using C/C++ and java) anyone who made a change to the production system without following all the test procedures (regression tests and QA signoff) would be canned in a second. (Unless it's the VP of Engineering -- but that's another story.) Or these personal sites they're talking about?
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Not only does my company have an extensive change control system in place, but until very recently, we had a "no changes on Monday" policy. Since Monday is our busiest day, it made good sense. In fact, we couldn't even run network cabling for new servers on Mondays. There were little signs all over the building that said, "A Monday without change is like money in the bank!" Kinda cheesy, but it seemed to work.
We recently dropped the policy, but I'm not sure if there has been any fallout from doing so.
I don't care what the question is, but the answer is FileMaker. --HarvDog