Noooo the last part was critical. That was the part that explained how “moving fast” by not having a dev environment is justified because it taught them the crucial lesson of having a dev environment. Does that seem paradoxical to you? That’s because you’re not thinking about it fast enough!!

Dang, sorry to hear you lost your raw unfiltered high octane startup velocity all the way back in 2006. /s

Beware: a toxic and probably unfair rant lies below.

I hate this type of content and I hate the tone the author takes. Like every mistake they made is actually secretly a good thing in disguise. Every setback and misfortune can be spun into “a win” if you’re clever enough (or in this case, if you pay to upgrade to the premium version of the service you’re using. So… money?)

It’s all in service of meritocratic narratives. “I fucked something up but actually that was great, which means that if things don’t go great for you it’s not because something bad happened, but because you choked and weren’t as inspired and entrepreneurial as me and didn’t make lemonade from your lemons which is why you’re worse than me and deserve to be poor and my company is great and give me your money and give us your money and money I deserve money because I’m smart and good and better than you GIVE it GIVE IT now NOW”

The whole writing style just makes my skin crawl.

“Picture this: It’s a Friday evening in Paris, and I’m wrapping up what should have been a routine week at Joe AI, the real-estate startup where we were building an AI agent that automated communications for property developers across France.”

We’re starting with the shilling and advertising already? My goodness, at least buy me a coffee ($5 ♥️) first!

“Now, here’s where I should mention a small detail: we were developing directly on the production database. You heard that right. No staging environment, no safety nets. Just pure, unfiltered startup velocity. We were early-stage, moving fast, and honestly? It felt like the right trade-off at the time.”

Eeeyyyyuuuck. “A small detail” hits like some 2012 Marvel trailer joke “he’s right behind me isn’t he? 🤪”. “Uhhh, yup. You heard that right.” And oh my God “pure unfiltered startup velocity “. No, that’s not “””“start-up velocity””“”. That’s a stupid half-assed business plan that doesn’t deserve to be called “engineering”, and it blew up in your faces and you were only saved because other actual engineers at your DB provider were smart enough to have backups of the data before you upgraded to get access to it. Damn their diluted established business meandering rate of stability and reasonable choices! As if you couldn’t make a replica or at least a periodic backup or have a god damn dev or test environment. I have a test environment for my private react apps for God’s sake.

“Without even asking my team for credit card details (everything was broken, time was critical), I threw my personal card at the upgrade and prayed those automatic backups existed.”

See? Our hero has actualized his triumphant victory in the story by committing the noblest and most wonderful thing any hero could ever achieve: he has spent his personal money (i.e the only thing he or you or anyone else is good for) without being asked, for the good of his company!! Thus representing his willingness to make the ULTIMATE sacrifice (money) in exchange for the ultimate payoff (the continued chance at making lots of money later). I guess that’s why this post is filed under “Profitable Programming” (barf).

“Here’s the technical takeaway: Never use CASCADE deletes on critical foreign keys.”

I…this…this is your takeaway? Why do you think cascade deletes on critical foreign keys are even allowed by the software then? Really, never???

This is like saying “I accidentally shit my only pair of underwear before my date night. The takeaway here is to never shit until your underwear are off.”. No, the takeaway is to own more than one pair of underwear, obviously. The takeaway can’t be “simply never do the stupid wrong thing”.

But now, our hero has triumphed against their darkest hour and will return to the land of the living, bearing the ambrosia wisdom of the gods: “But here’s what surprised me most about this disaster: it actually made us stronger as a team. That weekend, I spent hours setting up local Supabase instances for development”

Oh!! But I thought local dev instances was for dumb slow lame-o non-startups??? So the big payoff of this mistake was…now you’re finally doing what you should have been doing all along? Sorry, you don’t get to spin that as a success story. That’s just not a double failure story. You could have had this “success” from the onset, without nearly losing all your data, just by circlejerking less about your idea of what a startup is supposed to be and just doing your job the right way, the way you knew you were supposed to all along.

“Sure, I wish I’d set up local Supabase earlier, but missing that step is a small price to pay for the lessons we gained”

So let me get this straight, not setting up a local DB was a small price to pay to “gain the lesson” of… setting up a local DB? Hmmm…

And to cap it all off, we cite the Netflix CEO’s book. Truly the perfect disgusting corporate ass-kissing cherry to top off this bullshit sundae.

Nice, that’s pretty cool. Like I mentioned in my other comment though, I’m less concerned about getting this functionality for myself, but more about how to most easily distribute it to as many Lemmy users as possible so that it becomes a part of the service itself - just because I feel like that kind of feature has benefits for the whole community as it is more adopted.

Yeah very true! It’s just too bad that then it wouldn’t be a core/universal feature, but I agree it makes the most sense on the client. I just wish it was possible to make it more universal, since this seems like a feature that would be useful to average users, but selecting clients based on these features seem more like a power-user level of concern. I suppose that would just be a matter of clients all copying useful features from each other if it gets popular.

Oh, yeah, I know. My issue is more about the word being reused so much. Whenever I see a word take off memetically like that I feel like it’s usually accompanied by a lack of deep thought. Almost like a thought-terminating cliche.

Yeeees although I feel like I’m walking into a trap rn

I’m more sick of hearing “slop slop slop slop slop” than I am of hearing about AI at this point. People sling slop around like it’s some sort of brave, heroic, destructive insult, leaving AI users in tears and shambles in its wake. Ironic considering a complaint against AI is that it regurgitates the same characteristic bit of content over and over again mindlessly. But even ChatGPT would have the writing skill to cycle in some other adjectives, my goodness.

Thanks for this counterpoint, that’s exactly the sort of thing I think people need to see when thinking about moving (whether emigrating from America or anywhere else) - what’s the big problems for people there, what’s their equivalent of these problems. Would you mind telling me which party this is so I can do some more research on it?

Yes, I’ve had this suspicion awhile. Last year an ex-coworkerif mine was quoting the disproportionate crime rate among black people statistics at me and then leveled up into saying Africa is such a desolate place and so only unintelligent people would have stayed there in ancient times, thus meaning there’s a selective breeding for unintelligence in that continent. I tried to argue with him about the dubiousness of IQ measures in the first place, let alone IQ heritability, and the deep statistical flaws in the crime rate argument, which don’t disentangle race from poverty, but as soon as I tried to make these counterarguments he brushed me off as being “brainwashed” by “lies about equality”.

I don’t even know what to do about something like that other than just stop talking to the person. What’s terrifying is he’s otherwise pretty smart, totally fits in with respectable society. Not some stereotypical redneck racist type. I think about that a lot and wonder how many others like him are going totally undetected around me every day.

Yeah, some of that is the impromptu nature of this post. I’ve thought about moving to other countries since high school. I’m very interested in a lot of cultural things that are just vastly more prevalent and thriving in Europe. Sometimes it feels like I was born in the wrong place. So there are definitely places I’d love to run to. I visited Switzerland and it felt like heaven on Earth compared to my state. I wanted to move there long before Trump’s first election. But it seems that particular country is near impossible to move to, plus Swiss German seems particularly tough.

I really like learning about other cultures and such, I’m afraid I may have come off entirely wrong in the brevity and laser-focus of my original post.

Very interesting that you say the working language would be English. That’s fantastic news. I definitely think I can get to a basic conversational level with languages pretty quickly, but reaching the technical professional level is my big fear. So that’s very encouraging to hear that it may not be so dire as that at least in the Netherlands. Thank you for taking the time to respond!

It certainly seems that way! Some of the ESL speakers I’ve met from Europe are more articulate than native speakers that I work with. What I most wonder about is the prevalence of English in the workplace. I think I’d feel guilty using English at work in country with its own different official language, unless it was really like, standard even before “the guy from America” joined the team, lol.

My German teacher had a fairly profound impact on my life, I knew him for four years and he was absolutely enamored with everything about Germany. Like the German equivalent of a weeb. Some of that has transferred to me, I like basically every aspect of German culture I’m familiar with, especially the sense of humor. Since I already have some language familiarity, it’s always been near the top of my list, until recently with the AfD stuff giving me a bit of a fright. Although I saw they were recently classified as extremists, which was reassuring (thanks Lemmy for being such a good news source!)

It’s of course too bad to hear about the rural racism, especially since I’d prefer a rural place of living, but it seems those two things always go together to some extent.

I’m certainly going to enroll in classes for whatever language corresponds to my target country. I really want to be an exemplary citizen of anywhere I go. I feel it’s an honor to be accepted for a visa somewhere so I don’t want to take that lightly. My biggest concern is just that I won’t be that great with the target language despite my best efforts.

Thank you very much for your insights and kind words!

Thanks for understanding, I do feel a bit hurt by some insinuations in some responses, but I understand why citizens of the world would feel unhappy with whiny Americans right now. I just hope it doesn’t progress into a hatred. Many of my fellow Americans are very good people, but unfortunately we are so disenfranchised politically - I think it’s hard to convey the extent of it. The state of things here isn’t a result of laziness and unwillingness to participate. But in fairness, I didn’t refine my original post deeply and it came off not quite right. I’m not looking to selfishly abandon ship or become a silent drain on another country. I would love to build community, but it’s certainly easier in some places than others, for a wide variety of reasons.

Canada is certainly tempting if only on the basis that I would be closer to my family, and my family closer to me. And the recent election results were very relieving. Weed is legal here too though, haha.

Thanks, for some reason Spain has never been near the top of my consideration. I suppose that’s because it’s not one of those classic “top ten” type of countries that seem to always be at the top of lists of good things. But it seems the margins of improvement are slim between top 30 and top 10, so I’ll have to look more into that.

Yes, I’ve thought about this a lot and do make efforts to improve my environment. But it’s disheartening, the vast majority of people in my community are extreme Trump supporters. I know people who threw parties to celebrate the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. It’s hard to know how to improve my community in light of that, and in fact it’s hard to even want to.

But I am open to suggestions, what do you think are some of the best things I could do to improve my area?

I deeply agree with the community aspect. I can see how my original post came off as self-centered, but it’s always been my vision to be an active contributor to the local and larger communities of wherever I live. I am generally a pro-social person and do my best to help my local community. I definitely agree that building a strong community is vital to the criteria I’m looking for. It’s just that my current community feels largely like a lost cause. We certainly have a subculture that is what I’m looking for, but it’s just that - a subculture. And while that may be comforting and nice, it’s not enough to get politicians to listen.

I try to stave off the harms of capitalism as best I can while also balancing my own happiness for my limited time on Earth. But that’s a topic I’m sure we could both write essays about, so maybe best to save that for another time.

Yes, I wouldn’t be renouncing U.S citizenship unless I really had to. I’ve stayed this long precisely because I don’t want to leave the “problem spot” and cause it to only have extremists left over living here. I do try to support events and businesses that support causes I agree with, but that’s about all there is to do as far as I can see. As I said in other comments, I would truly prefer to fix things here, as I like many things about my life here. But it’s starting to feel like I’m complicit in something wrong by remaining a resident and I’m not sure what to do about it.

I would certainly rather fix this one than leave, but it’s pretty dismal. There are already large protests, almost nobody is satisfied with how things are, yet nothing changes. Our elected officials don’t listen to us, even on the off chance that one I like gets elected in my area. The best I can hope for is that someone will run who will just keep things as bad as they are, nobody ever actually improves things. I’ve never had an opportunity to vote for a candidate that actually represents my interests. I live in one of the most far right places in the country.

I really would like to fix it here. But I am very unsure as to how. There’s lots of community togetherness types of opportunities, but unfortunately having friends with like minds does no good when anyone with power doesn’t listen. And now even protesting, no, even just showing up to a political event on “the wrong side” is terrifying because of the effectiveness of mass surveillance and the complete lack of oversight on our police. I am open to specific suggestions on how to fix it.