I just returned from a consulting engagement in Seattle and traded banter with release engineers about “nightmare builds.” I’ve had these same discussions with other companies and it’s interesting how keyboard proximity has played a (vital) role in disasterous realtime, internet-based software release situations.

For example:

• 0 and O : Setting an env config file to PR0D instead of PROD
• 1 and ! : embedded config file regex for pattern matching
• E and 3 : dislexia at 2am
• = and == : Testing a runtime conditional only to “set” it
• - and = : dislexia at 2am
• l and | : meant a ‘pipe’ but fingers returned to homerow and hit an ‘el’ with the same finger

This entry was posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 4:50 am and is filed under .plan.