Hominus Noctrurna; Or, What Is Late Night Programming, Anywho?
It is a thing of legends, a break from the mundane, the crisis nights are some of the most interesting nights youâll have at work.
Nobody admits to it of course, but everybody loves those nights to bits.
I only had a couple as I am a learner; fixing MySQL, that crashed for no reason, sometimes companies kill processes that eat too much CPU on a shared host.
And I remember staying up to write PHP for some report, that one of the worldâs biggest companies would end up charging millions forâŚ
Buy it was a night of coding for me, as I could do whatever the heck I wanted to make things go.
And I do remember sitting on cold tiles at a colo facility, examining some pile of garbageâŚ.
Probably due to a unicode path exploit for Internet Information Server, and yeah it was nice, I was out of bounds, in the fancy liminal space.
But I was just installing hot fixes, not really examining any code.
I was told stories of cold nights, and sysops warming up by the AOL servers.
As their overpriced crap routers were choking on bad config files, written so sideways, that the routers were running out of memory!
A lot of people at the tiny ISPs have little training, but they make things work withy what they got.
I remember some property flipping sheisters putting a period in their email, and taking down postfix mailserver of some such.
Inducing a night of frantic RTFM-ing for the admin, to get that period in there.
And even one time, one admin couldn't go home, because of some kid with a sligshot, a building or two over, they never found him.
Ended up hitting the front window, and the acting administrator, ended up spending the night poking at his colorful iMac.
All these stories would echo for days, and really were a highlight of the otherwise boring days.
I was always extremely careful, not to get stuck working my life away, even though I still overworked, I would shy away from giving up years of life.
My late nights of programming were done for me, and for me only, for my ideas, for my skills and mastery of programming magic.
And that is how it should be, you have to be rewarded in lessons and experiences, not just overtime.
When you build your own companies, you can take defensive moves.
Programmers in a large company practice due diligence, or âeveryone else is doing itâ methodology.
But when you work for yourself, you get a chance to do things wisely.
For example, there is nothing you can hack on a static host, that just serves web pages without executing code on the server.
Or, if you must use a password, use a GUID number, they are 32 characters long, and pretty much occur only once.
If you are processing credit cards, let the user sign up on a secure server, and then refer to that account by account number.
This way the card is never leaves that server, it is an easy system to secure, as it does one thing well.
Same for user accounts, keep them on a distant server as a service, that many of you applications can use.
And you can be very precise in what functions are allowed, so there is no room for leaking information.
If you allow yourself good programming practices, and think ahead of time, you wonât have to glue broken server pieces.
But the call to stay up and master something fascinating, like combining signals with Objects or Trees to make programming reactive.
Will always be there, and if you are facing a boring afternoon, or even a long late night, it will come and bite you in the best of ways.