A Favor to the Players, An Apology to Koi, A Statement of Intent
Posted: Thu May 17, 2018 8:38 am
I know many of you are jonesing for your Underlight fix. To a great extent -- or maybe to the greatest extent -- the current outage is my fault. Due to a stupid off-by-one bug on the client it caused the client to think you had arts you shouldn't. While this was an easy enough bug to fix it also necessitated a server rebuild and an audit of the database to ensure nothing slipped in. At that point I'm sure they realized something else terrible: the live server has a different build system than dev. I hacked it together to rebuild the server on the prod server but I only did it "well enough" to build the server. This almost certainly left artifacts of libs strewn all over the filesystem, not to mention any other security flaws which I know nothing about.
When a person who has been coding for almost 15 years introduces a catastrophic bug it is a blow to the ego: professionally and personally. I take full responsibility for the current outage.
Then fix it! you say. And I should. I could, I think although I couldn't tell you for certain. Unfortunately I let my pride get in the way of a fix.
After Wish livestreamed the patch video and I watched it I was hurt. I felt like I deserved a shout-out of appreciation; nothing more, but at least a, "Hey, Tary (macobas) did amazing work on 3.1.5 and 3.1.6, AE items and flight weren't even stuff the team asked for but it made the environment cooler." I know Wish thinks that, and I know the others did too. My pride demanded an acknowledgement and that's my own personal flaw.
Unfortunately I tend to also have a bit of a temper. My temper glows white-hot but it's like one of those old magnesium camera flashes: super bright and then it goes away. I don't hold grudges, but I can fly off the handle at least verbally (I am not a violent person, thank goodness, I would never ever dream of raising my hand against someone else, even in the throes of my anger, but boy can I yell). I flew off the handle. In Discord. In the internal Koi slack. I said things I shouldn't have and I apologize for that. I apologize to Wish, Drama and Copyright. But most of all -- and no offense to you three -- I apologize to Jor.
I need to tell you something about JorKyrin. I have worked with some of the best sysadmins in my career in the financial sector. Jor is a level above; he's a great sysadmin but he also gets the dev side. It's a rare combo, not one you see often. And unfortunately, when Jor told me I needed to cool off, I lit into him as well. Guy just had hernia surgery, by the way, and now he has to deal with my bug on top of this. To be fair to me, Jor kinda embodies the BOFH persona which, when combined with an angry macobas does not end wonderfully. Maybe Jor keeps the servers locked down a little TOO tight, but it's better than the opposite. So I apologize to you, most of all.
Do I think I deserve acknowledgement? Yes. Do I think I could have handled myself better? Definitely. To that end my offer that I made privately to Wish still stands.
This isn't an "I'm sorry, let me back" post. I badly burned myself out on these two patches, dedicating more time to UL coding than to work, than to my family. I have a hard time working in half-measures; I am all-in or not in at all. I can't just do an hour a week, especially when a cool idea comes to me, I need to do it NOW NOW NOW or else I can't sleep, can't stop thinking about it... it's not a healthy personality trait, and I daresay it's probably what drove a lot of my anger when I blew up.
Finally I want to publicly acknowledge some individuals who have just been kicking butt:
Wish, Drama, Jor, Seeker, Scribbles, Copyright: you guys have been going hard. Thank you.
Cipher: Thanks for helping me with the testing, sorry for hitting at you so hard with all the invis shenanigans.
If you're not on this list it's only because I don't play UL and I may not know what you do outside of it. Either way: thank you.
Let' s keep kicking ass.
When a person who has been coding for almost 15 years introduces a catastrophic bug it is a blow to the ego: professionally and personally. I take full responsibility for the current outage.
Then fix it! you say. And I should. I could, I think although I couldn't tell you for certain. Unfortunately I let my pride get in the way of a fix.
After Wish livestreamed the patch video and I watched it I was hurt. I felt like I deserved a shout-out of appreciation; nothing more, but at least a, "Hey, Tary (macobas) did amazing work on 3.1.5 and 3.1.6, AE items and flight weren't even stuff the team asked for but it made the environment cooler." I know Wish thinks that, and I know the others did too. My pride demanded an acknowledgement and that's my own personal flaw.
Unfortunately I tend to also have a bit of a temper. My temper glows white-hot but it's like one of those old magnesium camera flashes: super bright and then it goes away. I don't hold grudges, but I can fly off the handle at least verbally (I am not a violent person, thank goodness, I would never ever dream of raising my hand against someone else, even in the throes of my anger, but boy can I yell). I flew off the handle. In Discord. In the internal Koi slack. I said things I shouldn't have and I apologize for that. I apologize to Wish, Drama and Copyright. But most of all -- and no offense to you three -- I apologize to Jor.
I need to tell you something about JorKyrin. I have worked with some of the best sysadmins in my career in the financial sector. Jor is a level above; he's a great sysadmin but he also gets the dev side. It's a rare combo, not one you see often. And unfortunately, when Jor told me I needed to cool off, I lit into him as well. Guy just had hernia surgery, by the way, and now he has to deal with my bug on top of this. To be fair to me, Jor kinda embodies the BOFH persona which, when combined with an angry macobas does not end wonderfully. Maybe Jor keeps the servers locked down a little TOO tight, but it's better than the opposite. So I apologize to you, most of all.
Do I think I deserve acknowledgement? Yes. Do I think I could have handled myself better? Definitely. To that end my offer that I made privately to Wish still stands.
This isn't an "I'm sorry, let me back" post. I badly burned myself out on these two patches, dedicating more time to UL coding than to work, than to my family. I have a hard time working in half-measures; I am all-in or not in at all. I can't just do an hour a week, especially when a cool idea comes to me, I need to do it NOW NOW NOW or else I can't sleep, can't stop thinking about it... it's not a healthy personality trait, and I daresay it's probably what drove a lot of my anger when I blew up.
Finally I want to publicly acknowledge some individuals who have just been kicking butt:
Wish, Drama, Jor, Seeker, Scribbles, Copyright: you guys have been going hard. Thank you.
Cipher: Thanks for helping me with the testing, sorry for hitting at you so hard with all the invis shenanigans.
If you're not on this list it's only because I don't play UL and I may not know what you do outside of it. Either way: thank you.
Let' s keep kicking ass.