this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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So today I discovered that there's a cron job that holds non-reproducible state that died, and now our system is fucked.

The cron job doesn't live inside any source control. This morning it entered a terminal state, and because it overwrites its state there's no way to revert it.

I'm currently waiting for the database rollback and have rewritten it in a reproducible/idempotent way.

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[–] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 165 points 6 days ago (2 children)

What's extra frustrating is the previous guy did create a git repo of these types of hacks, but this one doesn't live in it for no discernible reason.

[–] Colloidal@programming.dev 138 points 6 days ago (2 children)
[–] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 113 points 6 days ago (3 children)

He does charge a consulting fee to "fix" these issues

Almost all of them are dumb shit like this, where something is built in super hacky and dumbass ways.

[–] blarth@thelemmy.club 100 points 6 days ago

It’s his kill switch and he forgot to check in.

[–] peregrin5@lemm.ee 59 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Smart man. This is how we fight being replaced by AI.

[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 19 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Judgement day postponed indefinitely due to "Object reference not set to an instance of an object"

[–] kiagam@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

I don't know why but this is the first time I read this phrase and it actually makes sense.

I knew exactly what it meant before, but it didn't make sense until now

[–] Stanley_Pain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Super hacky and dumb? Sign me up 😂

[–] swab148@lemm.ee 7 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Me running all my services in tmux

[–] Sherry@programming.dev 4 points 5 days ago (2 children)

that might be a stupid question, but why would you running all services in tmux be a bad idea? a co-worker of mine is doing exactly that right now, which is why I'm asking.

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)
  1. They're all gone when you restart
  2. It doesn't properly deal with logging
  3. You can't set up dependencies between services but that doesn't matter due to point 1

I recommend using systemd services and/or docker compose instead. systemd services are files that describe which program / script to run and when (like after networking is active or after a certain other service is loaded).

[–] swab148@lemm.ee 4 points 5 days ago (2 children)

It's not horrible, like it'll do the job just fine, it's just probably a better idea to use systemd and like, containers and whatnot, but I couldn't be arsed to fiddle with all that for Jellyfin, caddy reverse proxy, and two modded Minecraft servers, so shell scripts and tmux won the day. It takes a little extra time to restart everything after an update, and maybe I'll get the motivation to do things "correctly™" one day, but today is not that day.

[–] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Use the tmux resurrect plugin. It will restore your tmux session to its previous state after a restart, including programs if you like.

You can put off doing things "correctly™" even longer.

[–] whats_all_this_then@programming.dev 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The "here's how you keep doing this poorly but more efficiently" energy on display here is a refreshing change of pace from the usual "here's how you do this correctly" crap peddled by normies (including me). You have my respect.

[–] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 4 points 4 days ago

If you're going to do something wrong, do it wrong right.

[–] Sherry@programming.dev 2 points 5 days ago

thank you very much for the detailed response :)

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago
[–] koper@feddit.nl 20 points 6 days ago (1 children)

But the whole point of the doomsday machine is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?

[–] MyBrainHurts@lemmy.ca 10 points 6 days ago

It was going to be announced at his retirement party on Monday... You know the dev likes surprises.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 6 days ago

And a kbase with no entry for it.

[–] symbioticremnant@lemmy.world 86 points 6 days ago

So do you work for Spotify or Zoom?

[–] arotrios@lemmy.world 73 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

This is almost exactly what happened to me on Monday, resulting in a fifteen hour day.

My particular jenga piece was an Access query that none of my predecessors had deigned to document or even tell me about... but was critical to run monthly or you had obsolete data embedded deep within multi-million dollar reports.

Thank god I don't work on salary anymore, or I'd be really upset.

[–] floo@retrolemmy.com 54 points 6 days ago

I stopped reading at “Access” and just wept a silent tear for you.

[–] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 33 points 6 days ago

Oh god Access.

You have my condolences.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 33 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Only tangentially related, but "What a elegant house of cards" is an insult i'm going to use someday.

[–] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 6 days ago

Cron job that evals some base64 encoded string which is actually downloading a script from a personal GitHub repo of an IT guy who left...

[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 21 points 6 days ago

AHAHAHAHAHAHA you couldn't make this up

[–] Primer81@lemmy.zip 23 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Idempotent code/repositories are great - I love making everything as reproducible as possible. Particularly in make where every 'all' type command should have a corresponding 'clean' command. Many times I'll see code bases where they skip defining the 'clean' command... or worse, have no 'all' command to begin with and rely on the developer knowing all the build and environment setup commands...

[–] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 21 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, I don’t consider most code complete unless it’s safe and reproducible. I love make, currently using npm but you can set up scripts with it. Automating the build process was the very first thing I did.

This project is a piece of work. There’s effectively no documentation, and every now and then I find something new like this. The stuff I’ve fixed up so far has been much much more reliable and performant.

Part of me just wants to rewrite the whole thing, but I need to ship features so we can sell the product and pay my salary.

At least I’m not a cog in a huge corporation getting my soul crushed every day. I actually love fixing weird stuff.

[–] SchwertImStein@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

since you are currently using npm, check out pnpm

also "just" seems to be a more modern replacement for make

[–] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 4 points 5 days ago

I'll check out both, thanks!

[–] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 17 points 6 days ago

We have a couple of those at work. Black boxes that are used.

I'm rebuilding one after it failed on one morning for SQL odbc reasons. And its just a binary that shuffles data around.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Had a similar thing once. Some how, some way, the DBA copied and pasted something wrong. Oracle DB had some odd extra syntax for left and right joins that other DBs didn't (or at least that I'd never seen). My best guess is that he auto formatted out of habit and maybe it took those symbols out.

It took a long time to find that. Because the only evidence something was wrong was that ONE of our customers wasn't being billed for ONE product. Everyone else was fine. Basically they were using it in a very atypical way. The left joins made sure to include them in the billing even because they didn't have whatever was on the right of that join. Everyone else did.

[–] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

SQL auto format is still mostly terrible

The only half decent format is to start from the Mozilla style and then make it more sane.

I’ve been playing with sqlglot lately and want to start using it for diffs.

[–] slacktoid@lemmy.ml 14 points 6 days ago

Why does this sound like maintaining my nextcloud instance from time to time?

[–] Godort@lemm.ee 14 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Time to restore a whole machine backup to a VM with no network connectivity, and manually pull the command?

[–] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 21 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I was able to do that

Turns out there was a second bug which triggered this one, and a bug I found in this script that I thought was responsible was happening silently for months.

Now three bugs are squashed

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 3 points 5 days ago

For us it's a task that no one is even aware of and the first issue is the customer saying their data export doesn't work. You had a data export?

[–] someguy3@lemmy.world 11 points 6 days ago (4 children)
[–] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 36 points 6 days ago

Cron is a scheduler to run a program at a set frequency

[–] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 15 points 6 days ago

The executive branch of the US government.

[–] NewDark@lemmings.world 14 points 6 days ago

Scheduled job, but implies that it uses a cron format.

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 0 points 5 days ago

An older way of automating stuff.

It's not there by default nowadays, because systemd tends to fulfil their requirements.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 6 days ago

Somebody’s having a fun day! /s

[–] floo@retrolemmy.com 3 points 6 days ago

Just update your Clang library!