I know I’m not a great coder, but I like to think I’m at least decent or even good on occasion. The events of the past week illustrate that even that estimation may be a stretch.

When I came to work on Monday morning, I discovered that one of my database tables was exceedingly empty. For about an hour, I was convinced I had been hacked. However, after checking every last thing, I finally discovered the culprit – a leftover setup script had dropped and re-created the databases. There are so many things that went wrong, I am inclined to enumerate them:

• I LEFT A SETUP SCRIPT ON THE SERVER
• There was no logging in place, so it took ages to diagnose the problem and rule out hacking
• I had left unneccesary CREATE/DROP privileges turned on when only INSERT was needed
• I found a SQL Injection vulnerability (that had been added in a last minute tweak)
• I didn’t have an automated backup in place
• I almost made a manual backup on Friday afternoon but then thought “What could go wrong?”
• I had looked at the data several times in the last week in a spreadsheet, but didn’t save the spreadsheet and it was gone from the local cache
• The only other person who had been downloading daily had deleted the one column I needed – every single day.

So it was pretty much a conspiracy of every single possible thing going wrong. At least, I learned a good number of lessons about the value of logging and automated backups – in the future, I will be much less cavalier. Mercifully, the server administrators (who are more prudent than your author) take nightly snapshots. After prostrating myself at the altar of the Unix Gods, my database was restored after 3 days with minimal lossage.

In an unrelated matter, I am updating a website whose data access must be completely changed to implement a new protocol. Looking back at my old code, I am frankly unimpressed. The separation of data, logic, and UI is downright bad. If I had designed this well the first time (about 18 months ago), it would be a relatively simple matter of swapping out the data layer. Instead, I am now forced to go back and re-do the whole thing over, only better this time.

So it’s been a big week for humble pie. I know it’s healthy for us humans to get frequent reminders of our fallability and to learn from our mistakes, but that doesn’t make it fun.