Flutterby™! : Just-In-Time Programming 2007-01-13 03:30:43.740389+00

Just-In-Time Programming

2007-01-13 03:30:43.740389+00 by meuon 9 comments

You heard the phrase here first, from me. It's what you call code you show your 'boss' major system changes 30 minutes before he's supposed to show them to a big customer, hadn't tested them much when he says "make them live". So you copy them from development servers to production servers. During the conference call itself.,you are making minor cosmetic adjustments, just as has says: "now click on.." - And it all works flawlessly for the end users. It not just for manufacturing anymore, it's for programing as well. (and the geek runs off.. screaming..)

Am I? You must know something I don't. I wish I was getting paid God's salary.. or at least had his benefit package.

I can remember programming a conveyor diverter while watching 24 boxes getting closer and closer. The programming changes went live when the lead box was about four feet from the bar code reader that would divert the pallets worth of boxes to the correct palletizer. They all went to the correct palletizer along with the next 40 that was going to another palletizer.

Yeah... That's right up there with coding a virus to infect an alien invader's ship's computer...

You must be living on another planet. That would never work for me. When I was at Mindscape, we learned to never utter the words, "Watch this!", for they were inevitably followed by utter catastrophe. (I don't think I've ever uttered utter twice in the same sentence before!)

Dave, Yes, I live on my own little planet. Dan, Eric, Nancy and others will attest to it. But on the technical side: building a toolset and all of the application code myself gives me an edge on how things will act, and LAMP, especially the PHP side.. makes magic happen easily, and breaks well when it breaks. at least, for me it does, YMMV.

Meuon's been doing this kind of coding since he first learn to edit code - and I bet any amount of money he's not using any kind of revision control software... But that's meuon. Of course, there have been incidents where his code has gone live without his knowing it...

gone live without his knowing it.. - Isn't that how most dotbombs were created? Laughing. As for version control, actually on the NK project, we kinda do. lots of name-date.zip files with code and mysql dumps. fewer, but much bigger .zip's (200+mb and growing fast) of everything that can be unzipped on a generic LAMP server, run 'genesis.sh' and 'poof' you have a running system. This gets tested at least weekly. The 'dev' server is usually a day ahead of production in code, and a day behind in databases and content.. and simply by changing IP's can swap places.

But I've learned the good LAMP-ish projects should be that portable, and that you can run them off of a modest (600mhz) laptop in development, and production when the need arises.

The previous system was built using lots of CVS, but the PHD's involved had less of a concept of how to use one properly than I do. It's impossible to build a working system from it.. too much mismatched code. Luckily, Joe the wonder-sysadmin was privately maintaining another CVS of code that worked together.

A good example of LAMP's difference from "1.0" to "3.0", and 1.0 was buit using a minimum of 3 physical servers, a webserver, a tomcat/java server and a dedicated postgreSQL box. 3.0 is running on a generic 1u, 2 CPU server. Joe was used to doing mass enrollments and user maintenance off-peak so that it did not bog the system..lock tables, etc. It could take 15-20 minutes to do 7000-10000 enrollments (about 20 sql transactions each..) and would often hang. 3.0, in PHP/MySQL did it in under 15 seconds.