I've had my share of SQL messes but nothing critical (thankfully!). Probably the worst as far as effect goes was a while back in a low paying dev job. I was under immense pressure to fix some thumbnails for an e-commerce site (as in, if this isn't done in 10 minutes, get your coat and get out). The shop I worked for was getting pressure from the client as they'd put it off for weeks at that point.
So.. I write a quick script to resize the master images and re-generate around 2,000 thumbnails. Except... I copy/paste the source path to destination - and I mistype 200px width as 20. Now we have a whole site with long thin product images and no originals to recover from! As in the linked story, no backups were in place and all work was done on production. Lost a weeks wages over that, and had to manually re-add everything from a stack of CD's :)
Lesson learned? Don't let pressure force you into making bad decisions. I knew I really shouldn't be doing that but I was young & foolish.
Next to my first Basic attempts on the ZX81 and AMOS on the Amiga, Delphi was the most fun I've ever had programming. Oh to have something like that again!
If you like, my email is in my profile and we can talk it over? I am hesitant to use this as a plea for work off HN - don't want to abuse the community and all but I won't turn things away :)
Well I guess this is something of a stealth project for myself and I don't really want to link it right now. I hoped for ideas on where someone would start, totally from scratch to give me a fresh approach. If this approach is unwise or inappropriate for here then I apologise and shall leave it at that.
I didn't include a link as the existing site is almost irrelevant and the vast majority needs to be scrapped. I'm more interested in how people would approach this from scratch with no preconceived notions. Like I said, I'm looking to approach this as carte Blanche to build a 21st century city guide/site/whatever and I'm having a brain freeze in that regard.
Only tangentially related maybe, but I've noticed an increase in the 'scamminess' of a lot of daily deals lately. Stuff like a cottage for £70/weekend but if you read the small print there's a 'cleaning charge' of £250 - to give one recent example.
I don't know if that perhaps hints at the desperateness of daily deal companies to get new business in running such promotions, but it certainly dampens any enthusiasm I have for checking these sites again in the future.
So.. I write a quick script to resize the master images and re-generate around 2,000 thumbnails. Except... I copy/paste the source path to destination - and I mistype 200px width as 20. Now we have a whole site with long thin product images and no originals to recover from! As in the linked story, no backups were in place and all work was done on production. Lost a weeks wages over that, and had to manually re-add everything from a stack of CD's :)
Lesson learned? Don't let pressure force you into making bad decisions. I knew I really shouldn't be doing that but I was young & foolish.