Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
In software development, there is no such thing as an application that doesn't fail. Do you remember the Blue screen of death? When it happened, there was nothing you could do but restart your machine and hope it doesn't happen again. But how about the latest Windows OS? How come you don't see those errors as often as before? The answer is, Microsoft spent more time on error handling.
Imagine a world where things just work the way they are supposed to. The application never crashes, the deployment is always successful, every team member follow the rules, and the FedEx guy is always on time. This is what we expect from our day to day work and fortunately it never happens. What we call ordinary is out of the ordinary.
One of the simple yet impactful struggles I have is to shut down an idea. As a developer, and I often try to tell people what I do, many people often try to validate their ideas with me. Some are friends, some are family, some are clients, the moment they hear programmer they think apps, VR, games, and what not. And then they tell me their ideas with the eagerness to impress.
In order to test a project locally I needed access to the production website database. Unfortunately copying billions of records to my small development VM was not an option. I needed only the latest records but doing a sqldump would get me data from as far back as 2004. The cool thing however is that mysql allows you to add a condition on your mysqldump command to extract whatever you see fit. Let's break it down.
