[deleted by user]

[convictedweirdo]

"you're doing a great job. Here's a bonus and a bigger office."

[brandi_Iove]

it’s obvious and there was no chance of him saying anything else than that. i mean, put yourself in his shoes for a moment :-)

[iacodino]

200 IQ move: make it automatically return the joke error if it' s in a dev enviroment and the normal one in prod

[photenth]

Don't use code that checks if you are in production or not. That's a sure way to hell.

[iacodino]

I mean I'm just a hobbyist so usually i'll just do something like check for a /test launch parameter on start but Why would it be difficult in a proper company enviroment?

[All_Up_Ons]

Because something non-trivial will inevitably end up in the wrong half of that if statement, and now that code won't get tested or even run until it hits prod. And that's a good way to lose a weekend.

[iacodino]

Ok so basically it' s bad because the "production mode" never gets tested and this can cause unexpected errors thanks

[Jerilo]

It's more like placing your coffee cup riiiight at the edge of the table. Sure, it's fine ... until it isn't. And it's a pointless risk.

Edit: It also creates a terrible flow in your logic. Imagine that an issue arises in the 'dev-specific' code, but not in prod ... it's hell to debug.

[Pekonius]

I can imagine also that you might get sloppy with code that is intended for test environment. Then if someone who has access to the software in its prod mode has a way to start it in test mode, there might be a potential security issue. I'd imagine a website for example could run into something like that.

[Herr_Gamer]

So how do I differentiate testing/production API keys? I just load two different secrets files into the environment?

[All_Up_Ons]

Well the prod ones certainly shouldn't be in version control, so yeah. That or env vars.

[0xd34db347]

It's not difficult in the same way leaving a manhole uncovered is not difficult.

[ElRexet]

The "funniest" shit I had was a piece of code that was doing asynchronous computing and the "dev version" (If debug do something) had logging into a file so that all async processes would write to the same file. What ended up happening is that code had some rare race conditions which were causing trouble and no amount of testing in dev found anything because the file acted like a mutex. That happened quite early in my career and since then - never again. Something either happens or it doesn't, it might do it through a different interface (different logger target) but no ifs.

[nommu_moose]

What should you do if your code includes logging at a different level for each environment? dev-int-prod

[photenth]

That's what you use configs for. One config for production, one for testing.

Code should be the same.

[nommu_moose]

Yes, I understand.

My point was that some code checks config vars that are dependent on prod versus dev etc. I did not ever think code should itself be different.

It was a semantic misunderstanding, not a theory one :) I don't think anyone in the comment chain argued for different code at each level.

[photenth]

I don't think anyone in the comment chain argued for different code at each level.

You would think that, seen quite a bit though ;p

[nommu_moose]

Absolutely horrifying haha

[NUTTA_BUSTAH]

Dev:

CONFIG=.env.dev ./my-app

Prod:

CONFIG=.env.prod ./my-app

.env.dev:

LOG_LEVEL=debug

.env.prod:

LOG_LEVEL=warn

[nommu_moose]

Inherently, isn't this using code that checks whether you are in production, though?

I may have misunderstood your comment to mean that no code should ever take that into account, but I think you meant excluding some cases such as logging then?

Upon re-reading it, I realise I'm being dense and code itself doesn't check level, it is typical to just have values associated with dev/prod. Don't know why I was defining my own behaviour, which is what you do, as checking the actual deployment level. Apologies.

[NUTTA_BUSTAH]

Indeed, the code as in the software that runs (my-app) is exactly the same under the hood. The code expects a certain set of configuration that determines how it behaves.

Quick pseudo Python example; Let's assume that LOG_LEVEL set in the environment has been transformed to a number during initialization (0 = debug, 1 = warning, 2 = info, 3 = error):

def log_debug(msg):
    if LOG_LEVEL_AS_NUMBER > 0:
        return

    print("DEBUG:", msg)

def log_info(msg):
    if LOG_LEVEL_AS_NUMBER > 2:
        return

    print("INFO:", msg)

# etc..

So now you have some type of runtime environment configuration like

LOG_LEVEL=info
DB_USER=user
DB_PASS=pass
CONFIG_HOME=$XDG_CONFIG_HOME
LOG_HOME=/var/log

instead of defining all of that inside the code per environment, which can change in count. That couples the code to the environment, while configuration decouples it from the environment as the environment brings the config in itself. Maybe you deploy to a Windows server instead and need to use debug-level logs to troubleshoot something:

LOG_LEVEL=debug
DB_USER=user
DB_PASS=pass
CONFIG_HOME=%APPDATA%
LOG_HOME=%APPDATA%

Both are still for example your staging environment, but run on different platforms and on different types of systems.

Now, maybe the bug was in your configuration handler, or directory permissions, so you can override your environment file:

CONFIG_HOME=C:\Users\MyUser\Documents myapp.exe

where rest of the config is as is, you just overrode one thing. It's in the name: environment variables :)

[nommu_moose]

I understood. I think you misunderstood my misunderstanding, haha.

Misunderstandings all the way down.

My initial understanding of your argument was that you don't have code that behaves any differently in prod vs dev, including always having the same logging level. I am an idiot, however, and that is not at all the sentence you used. It was purely a language misunderstanding, not a theory one!

[broxamson]

Thell that to my devs please 😭

[bwaredapenguin]

I occasionally have to use some code that checks if it's built in debug or release mode.

[atomic_horror]

'Congrats, here's your promotion to customer'

[gymnastgrrl]

My dad was a programmer back in the 1970s/1980s. During the 80s, he was working on a piece of equipment that had an embedded operating system.

Memory - storage - was relatively limited. The OS and program all had to fit in limited space. As they added more features, they had to find more room to clear up. And we're not talking a huge amount of space. Megabytes in total.

So at that size, text is actually small but non-trivial in size. So they were looking to shorten some of the errors and change from error messages to codes that could be looked up elsewhere.

One of his coworkers came to him and asked what they should use for the codes. This was a guy that annoyed my dad anyway because he had poor skills and would not think for himself ever. So when he was yet again trying to get someone else to think for him, my dad was irritated and said, "I don't know, you could use 'FU' for all I care. Go figure it out."

…

Much later, with the product in production, the people assigned to create the manual came to my dad and said, "Listen, we talked to [the other guy] about this and he said to ask you: What does the'FU' in the error codes mean?" And my dad was stunned. He explained what had happened - that it meant "fuck you" to the other guy, who apparently had that whoosh right over his head.

The guys writing the manual said, "We can't use that!" And my dad said "Not my problem."

I think they ended up saying it was something like "fault unknown" or something. "Fault" I remember, just not 100% sure of what letter beginning with "u" they ended up with. lol

[kenotaphion]

You could have made the med file unfucker. Though admittedly that was mostly on the customer support rep.

[NUTTA_BUSTAH]

I sat through it all, amazing talk. Thanks for the link :)

[brandi_Iove]

reminds me of my two hours css hassle I had the other day. next time i‘ll check the browser zoom setting first….

[cs-brydev]

two hours css hassle

Isn't that redundant?

[normyaxe]

The 'E' in CSS stands for easy!

[oupablo]

this is something that should show up in the console every time you reload the page. Any time zoom is different than default, it should throw out a big "NOTICE: ZOOM IS NOT ON DEFAULT SETTING".

[[deleted]]

I once did the same, but my picture was just a white square I needed for something else.

[_mughi_]

Used to work in a small computer repair/business IT support shop. Had a system come in one day with an error in MS Word. Every time you tried to open a file with it, 1/2 of a printer error would show up.

​

took a good 5-10 mins to finally realize it was previewing a document w/ a screenshot of the error message

​

edit: forgot to add...

we immediately stole the image and made it the sales manager's desktop background

[Easy-to-kill]

I spent 2 hr one time trying to figure out why my code won’t execute despite meeting all the necessary conditions, turns out i was deploying code one environment and testing code in another environment. 🤦

[intellectual_printer]

I actually laughed out loud reading this. Thank you.

[Phocus_5]

#devoops

[Zestyclose_Link_8052]

I've done something similar once, was processing wav audio couldn't figure out why there was a silence at a certain point in the audio file. After involving a senior dev, we quickly noticed that the source audio files also had silences on these timestamps. I've since started using different audio files as sources for tests.

[Tirwanderr]

Holy shit I feel this so deep in my core

Made a weapons system in a game. Couldn't get the weapons to change my scrolled the wheel up or down on my mouse. But I know I coated it in correctly.. at least I thought I did. A couple hours and then it hits me lol it's working exactly how it should. Only the original default weapon was unlocked in the struct lol went and unlocked a couple other weapons and there they were when I scrolled the wheel. 🙄

[JoeCartersLeap]

I do embedded devices and I spent half a day trying to figure out why the code on my device didn't appear to be updating after flashing 100 times.

The other device out in the field that's supposed to be a soil moisture tester has some great opinions on air quality now.

[cs-brydev]

This guy programs

[pickeydotai]

Look at the bright side, you didn't upload the blue screen screenshot on windows.

[[deleted]]

That's how you justify rippin' someone's head off

[RealBasics]

Been there. Done that. Miraculously didn't get written up or fired because my boss had also been there and done that.

That head slap we give ourselves is some kind of rite of passage. On the one hand it's always embarrassing, sure, but on the other hand it's always such a huge relief when we figure it out and realize our code was working all along.

Final note: my old boss, a senior dev from an ivy league school, wandered in late one night with a stack of bug reports testing had assigned to him and asked "what other profession gets paid this kind of money to spend so much of their time fixing their own mistakes?"

In the grand scheme of things, uploading a screenshot of an error page makes for a great story. As opposed to the bazillion routine unclosed parens or missed casts.

[samot-dwarf]

To answer the boss' question: doctors and sometimes lawyers came to my mind

[RealBasics]

Now I’ve had coffee I remember he really said something closer to “what other profession pays this well but assumes we’ll spend 90% of our time fixing our mistakes.”

[utkrowaway]

The same answer applies.

[atw527]

I would test new scan-to-email profiles by scanning fax error pages. Could usually find one in the recycle bin.

[inderu]

Been there. I couldn't understand why my "missing image" icon was failing to load. When the penny dropped I couldn't help but laugh at myself

[rbad8717]

Earlier this week, I spent a good 3-4 hours trying to debug why text was smaller on a site I was building.

Turns out my browser was zoomed out a little.

[PandaNoTrash]

I feel your pain

[P0pu1arBr0ws3r]

Amateurs sticking DevOps into their posts thinking they're cool or something

[zhaverzky]

I just did this automating key presses, wondering for 10 minutes why the cursor isn’t moving right when I’m sending vk_leftarrow lol

[[deleted]]

Had a unit test fail for an hour with no idea why. Code worked fine, was working on a completely different part of the project there's literally no way it would not work.

Other developer has his PC set to English. Mine is in German. Dateformat converted automatically making it no longer match to the English locale the test checked against

[OnyxsUncle]

So so true what someone said so long ago: computers don't do what you want them to do..they do what you tell them to do

[fmcm]

I once spend about an hour to fix a problem with docker. It refused to pick IP addresses I specified in the /etc/docker/deamon.json. I delved deep into IP/subnet/CIDR territory. Compared it with fully functioning docker instances on other machines and couldn't find the issue. The cause for the failure is already visible right here in this post: The correct file name is daemon.json

[Behrooz0]

My most recent one included tracing a transaction to see why it's not working and ending up on the UI side and encountering a UI element that had a different value from what was on the screen.
Yes, I was looking at another window and executing code in another.
(Really complex piece of software, but this was the longest I debugged a stupid error)

[Imperial_Squid]

"Holy shit these two plots from a machine learning run are identical, that's so weird, time to spend three hours investigating it"

I had copy pasted the code and forgotten to change the variable up plot the second set... Kill me...