Beware: a toxic and probably unfair rant lies below.
I hate this type of content and I hate the tone the author takes. Like every mistake they made is actually secretly a good thing in disguise. Every setback and misfortune can be spun into “a win” if you’re clever enough (or in this case, if you pay to upgrade to the premium version of the service you’re using. So… money?)
It’s all in service of meritocratic narratives. “I fucked something up but actually that was great, which means that if things don’t go great for you it’s not because something bad happened, but because you choked and weren’t as inspired and entrepreneurial as me and didn’t make lemonade from your lemons which is why you’re worse than me and deserve to be poor and my company is great and give me your money and give us your money and money I deserve money because I’m smart and good and better than you GIVE it GIVE IT now NOW”
The whole writing style just makes my skin crawl.
“Picture this: It’s a Friday evening in Paris, and I’m wrapping up what should have been a routine week at Joe AI, the real-estate startup where we were building an AI agent that automated communications for property developers across France.”
We’re starting with the shilling and advertising already? My goodness, at least buy me a coffee ($5 ♥️) first!
“Now, here’s where I should mention a small detail: we were developing directly on the production database. You heard that right. No staging environment, no safety nets. Just pure, unfiltered startup velocity. We were early-stage, moving fast, and honestly? It felt like the right trade-off at the time.”
Eeeyyyyuuuck. “A small detail” hits like some 2012 Marvel trailer joke “he’s right behind me isn’t he? 🤪”. “Uhhh, yup. You heard that right.” And oh my God “pure unfiltered startup velocity “. No, that’s not “””“start-up velocity””“”. That’s a stupid half-assed business plan that doesn’t deserve to be called “engineering”, and it blew up in your faces and you were only saved because other actual engineers at your DB provider were smart enough to have backups of the data before you upgraded to get access to it. Damn their diluted established business meandering rate of stability and reasonable choices! As if you couldn’t make a replica or at least a periodic backup or have a god damn dev or test environment. I have a test environment for my private react apps for God’s sake.
“Without even asking my team for credit card details (everything was broken, time was critical), I threw my personal card at the upgrade and prayed those automatic backups existed.”
See? Our hero has actualized his triumphant victory in the story by committing the noblest and most wonderful thing any hero could ever achieve: he has spent his personal money (i.e the only thing he or you or anyone else is good for) without being asked, for the good of his company!! Thus representing his willingness to make the ULTIMATE sacrifice (money) in exchange for the ultimate payoff (the continued chance at making lots of money later). I guess that’s why this post is filed under “Profitable Programming” (barf).
“Here’s the technical takeaway: Never use CASCADE deletes on critical foreign keys.”
I…this…this is your takeaway? Why do you think cascade deletes on critical foreign keys are even allowed by the software then? Really, never???
This is like saying “I accidentally shit my only pair of underwear before my date night. The takeaway here is to never shit until your underwear are off.”. No, the takeaway is to own more than one pair of underwear, obviously. The takeaway can’t be “simply never do the stupid wrong thing”.
But now, our hero has triumphed against their darkest hour and will return to the land of the living, bearing the ambrosia wisdom of the gods: “But here’s what surprised me most about this disaster: it actually made us stronger as a team. That weekend, I spent hours setting up local Supabase instances for development”
Oh!! But I thought local dev instances was for dumb slow lame-o non-startups??? So the big payoff of this mistake was…now you’re finally doing what you should have been doing all along? Sorry, you don’t get to spin that as a success story. That’s just not a double failure story. You could have had this “success” from the onset, without nearly losing all your data, just by circlejerking less about your idea of what a startup is supposed to be and just doing your job the right way, the way you knew you were supposed to all along.
“Sure, I wish I’d set up local Supabase earlier, but missing that step is a small price to pay for the lessons we gained”
So let me get this straight, not setting up a local DB was a small price to pay to “gain the lesson” of… setting up a local DB? Hmmm…
And to cap it all off, we cite the Netflix CEO’s book. Truly the perfect disgusting corporate ass-kissing cherry to top off this bullshit sundae.
Beware: a toxic and probably unfair rant lies below.
I hate this type of content and I hate the tone the author takes. Like every mistake they made is actually secretly a good thing in disguise. Every setback and misfortune can be spun into “a win” if you’re clever enough (or in this case, if you pay to upgrade to the premium version of the service you’re using. So… money?)
It’s all in service of meritocratic narratives. “I fucked something up but actually that was great, which means that if things don’t go great for you it’s not because something bad happened, but because you choked and weren’t as inspired and entrepreneurial as me and didn’t make lemonade from your lemons which is why you’re worse than me and deserve to be poor and my company is great and give me your money and give us your money and money I deserve money because I’m smart and good and better than you GIVE it GIVE IT now NOW”
The whole writing style just makes my skin crawl.
“Picture this: It’s a Friday evening in Paris, and I’m wrapping up what should have been a routine week at Joe AI, the real-estate startup where we were building an AI agent that automated communications for property developers across France.”
We’re starting with the shilling and advertising already? My goodness, at least buy me a coffee ($5 ♥️) first!
“Now, here’s where I should mention a small detail: we were developing directly on the production database. You heard that right. No staging environment, no safety nets. Just pure, unfiltered startup velocity. We were early-stage, moving fast, and honestly? It felt like the right trade-off at the time.”
Eeeyyyyuuuck. “A small detail” hits like some 2012 Marvel trailer joke “he’s right behind me isn’t he? 🤪”. “Uhhh, yup. You heard that right.” And oh my God “pure unfiltered startup velocity “. No, that’s not “””“start-up velocity””“”. That’s a stupid half-assed business plan that doesn’t deserve to be called “engineering”, and it blew up in your faces and you were only saved because other actual engineers at your DB provider were smart enough to have backups of the data before you upgraded to get access to it. Damn their diluted established business meandering rate of stability and reasonable choices! As if you couldn’t make a replica or at least a periodic backup or have a god damn dev or test environment. I have a test environment for my private react apps for God’s sake.
“Without even asking my team for credit card details (everything was broken, time was critical), I threw my personal card at the upgrade and prayed those automatic backups existed.”
See? Our hero has actualized his triumphant victory in the story by committing the noblest and most wonderful thing any hero could ever achieve: he has spent his personal money (i.e the only thing he or you or anyone else is good for) without being asked, for the good of his company!! Thus representing his willingness to make the ULTIMATE sacrifice (money) in exchange for the ultimate payoff (the continued chance at making lots of money later). I guess that’s why this post is filed under “Profitable Programming” (barf).
“Here’s the technical takeaway: Never use CASCADE deletes on critical foreign keys.”
I…this…this is your takeaway? Why do you think cascade deletes on critical foreign keys are even allowed by the software then? Really, never???
This is like saying “I accidentally shit my only pair of underwear before my date night. The takeaway here is to never shit until your underwear are off.”. No, the takeaway is to own more than one pair of underwear, obviously. The takeaway can’t be “simply never do the stupid wrong thing”.
But now, our hero has triumphed against their darkest hour and will return to the land of the living, bearing the ambrosia wisdom of the gods: “But here’s what surprised me most about this disaster: it actually made us stronger as a team. That weekend, I spent hours setting up local Supabase instances for development”
Oh!! But I thought local dev instances was for dumb slow lame-o non-startups??? So the big payoff of this mistake was…now you’re finally doing what you should have been doing all along? Sorry, you don’t get to spin that as a success story. That’s just not a double failure story. You could have had this “success” from the onset, without nearly losing all your data, just by circlejerking less about your idea of what a startup is supposed to be and just doing your job the right way, the way you knew you were supposed to all along.
“Sure, I wish I’d set up local Supabase earlier, but missing that step is a small price to pay for the lessons we gained”
So let me get this straight, not setting up a local DB was a small price to pay to “gain the lesson” of… setting up a local DB? Hmmm…
And to cap it all off, we cite the Netflix CEO’s book. Truly the perfect disgusting corporate ass-kissing cherry to top off this bullshit sundae.