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."
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!!
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
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"
Yes and guess who get to decide what is going to be implemented and when thats going to happen?
Like:
No, Im sure it's a great idea, so just do it. I want it done before 10am.
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 :)
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
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!!
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?..
Sheesh, next thing you know they'll start spouting nonsense like "burning the midnight oil leads to more bugs."
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 */
Lawrence: No. No, man. Shit, no man. I believe you'd get your ass kicked saying something like that.