Author: stlplace

I did a production release last week, by that I mean I was the release tech lead for the web app production releases for my current employer. It’s mostly uneventful, but like most other production releases, there is usually some learning opportunities. This time the opportunities lies in couple small areas: 1) Validation of database insert statements, make sure the spelling of the select statement is exact; 2) Staging the artifact for production, via GitHub action. I was a bit new to both “staging artifact” and GitHub Action, this time I learned on the spot, with help from a colleague.

Friendly crowd

This reminds me of another thing, that is for artist, for example a musician or a singer to perform. There is pressure on live performance too. Similar to production deployment, if we have a friendly crowd (customers in the case of websites) and a collaborative team, things will be a bit easier.

Saturday night all-nighter

Some more tips on production deployment. I did do a few at my current job, and I did some at Mastercard (MC), my previous employer. The deployment was usually more stressful at MC. The main problem there is the production release usually happens on Saturday night, and it could be an all-nighter because the expectation is there, also it’s not easy to find all the right people quickly during the night. I recall once, I had to page my colleague, and he came on quickly, but we waited hours for the person to generate a new key (the old key expired, and the server would not start during restart). So basically, I could not completely go to bed, I laid down in the couch with headphone on, and I imagine my colleague did the same. Btw, the reason I asked help from my colleague was it’s the first time I encountered something like this (he has much more experience).

Lesson learned

At my current place, I did almost make a big mistake last year during production deployment. The issue was the UNIX engineer didn’t fully understand my instruction. Although one can argue my instruction was not very clear. But the end results was the engineer deleted much more arguments in the J2EE server configuration and the server would not start because of that. Luckily earlier I took my PM (project manager) colleague’s advice, and did a backup or save of the “before” arguments. So at least we have some references for the arguments as the UNIX engineer already deleted a bunch. Also the engineer called his senior engineer and he was able to bail out both of us. From that small incident I learned “don’t assume other people will always understand or follow the instructions”. Try to write good instructions, and also back up things as needed. Talking about backups, I usually do some DB backups when I delete something. That saved me once as I was trying to fix an issue at Mastercard. Basically when I realized my earlier fix didn’t work, I restore the data from my backup, and tried another approach. The second time it worked.

Performance

Back to artistic performance. I haven’t performed or competed for a long time. But I can see my older daughter got nervous before this sort of thing. And for my younger daughter: she tries to avoid those sorts of things, as much as practical, from junior tennis tournament to violin federation(performance) at UMSL, to string/music ensembles at Community Music School at Webster University. I can understand though. Because as I said in my other posts, I got nervous before Gaokao and other important exams too. The trick is, balance the nervousness with other important things such as preparing for the exam or the performances.

Btw, if you are in Yueyang, Hunan and surrounding areas, please note this – (Update 07-24-2025, from 何璟昕的微博) 听民谣，来岳阳🎶 我会参加7月25号、26号的湖畔音乐节演出，地点在岳阳港工业遗址公园，这次准备了3~4首从来没有在现场演出过的新歌曲，欢迎大家来玩！