open letter to six apart

[rone]

I would like to introduce to Six Apart the concept that those of us in systems administration call a "staging environment".  In it, one stages new releases on a reasonable facsimile of the production environment (that is, the one with live users), in order to avoid exposing the production environment to any late bugs that arise during deployment.  Please run it by your Director of Operations.

(If they'd hired me a year and a half ago, i could've given them a head start on this.  Too bad, so sad.)

Comments

[therobbergirl.livejournal.com]

I don't understand. How will the user base see the error messages then?

[manfire.livejournal.com]

Hey rone. I changed jobs last year and am at the point where one of my many tasks is Linux sysadminning. Please feel free to administer any flamage you see fit.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Please don't tell me it's Red Hat.

[manfire.livejournal.com]

.....

well, there are also HP-UX machines involved...!

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

You poor, poor man.

[reddragdiva]

No, no! Is CentOS. Completely different!

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Don't make me cross the pond and hurt you.

(I'm assuming you're still in the UK, since shortly before I stopped reading the Monastery, you had left Oz...)

[vatine]

He is and he's now properly housed and not slacking on my couch.

Six Apart

[thedarkages]

I have never liked Six Apart, from the time that they decided to charge Big Bux for Movable Type and, for that money, sold a version laden with bugs. I think Mena Trott is a sanctimonious little parsnip, and Ben's code could benefit from a vigorous application of Perl::Critic.

Needless to say, I was not pleased when they brought their corporatizing Weltanschauung to LiveJournal, and we are now reaping the fruits of same.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

In this particular instance, i would actually prefer to see some corporatization (?) of their operations; this isn't an outfit being run out of Brad's garage anymore, so there's no reason to keep running it like it is. It's a real company, so set up a real operational architecture.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

hee hee

WHAT????

[drieuxster.livejournal.com]

you mean that development network is not the QA Net, is not the acceptance network, is not the production network?????

OH MY GOD!!!! You Horrible Segregationalists!!!! Segregating the networks into their own little ghetto's where the end users are merely the dangly bits off the far end of the process!!!!!!

Re: Six Apart

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

and we are now reaping the fruits of same.

Without disagreeing about 6A's awfulness, Livejournal's inability to comprehend even the basic of sound production practices is very much homegrown, and was a constant part of the LJ experience long before the buyout (http://dr-memory.livejournal.com/56653.html).

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Man, i hate it when i rip off my friends' schticks.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

The funny thing was, when I read this post I found myself thinking "I know I said that once", but it then took me 15 minutes to find the post because ha ha ha lj still has no search feature.

[gallifreyan.livejournal.com]

Demand a credit!

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

DERE LJ: GIV ME THREE MOAR DAYS OF PAID ACESS OR I SHOOT THIS PUPPIE!!1

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

That'd be the S2 errors people were complaining about? I never saw any of them, and I don't know if I just wasn't using LJ at the wrong time, or if I was lucky, or if using S1 bypasses the brokenness. Because the last one would amuse me a bit.

[nothings.livejournal.com]

Somebody's page had an S2 error, and I tacked on ?style=mine (I have an S1) style and the error went away, yeah.

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

They have a staging environment. They fuck stuff up anyway.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

Man, you just don't get Web 2.0! We have to release often and we have to keep our demanding users up to date with the latest code! We give it to them as soon as it's been written! You're so behind, do you work for the government or something?

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

Where I work, there is a staging environment.

It doesn't help if you don't test at all.

[stoneself.livejournal.com]

testing? isn't that what the users are for?

end users

[drieuxster.livejournal.com]

No, End Users are merely randome event sequencers used to facilitate the create of test plans.

[cheesetruck.livejournal.com]

I haven't been using lj lately, much. Well, at all for really 2 weeks.

I don't miss their inability to do anything right at all.