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digging a little deeper
Wednesday, March 2 2011
This afternoon I was under the influence of my usual 90mg recreational dose of pseudoephedrine when I got an email requesting a list of all the changes I'd made to a very complicated server backend. The changes had included the addition of both a payment system and a platform (in this case a non-Facebook social network). Among other things, I'd had to change the data type of a core piece of data from bigint to varchar(20), and many many files had been affected. Did I remember what they were? Of course not. Had I not been under the influence of pseudoephedrine, I might have said that I had no idea and that it would be best to just push all the files live, or else to search my old emails and find the one where I answered this very same question five months ago (it sounded strangely familiar). But pseudoephedrine makes me dig a little deeper and feel good while doing so. I ended up doing a global search on the entire server file system looking for column names matching the ones whose data type I'd been forced to change. I tracked them all down, assembled an email, and sent it off. And instead of feeling angry and overworked (as such a request would have normally made me feel), I felt agile and competent. Stimulants are fun, even when they're just misused OTCs.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110302 feedback
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