|
|
|
overly-tart vegetable soup
Wednesday, July 30 2025
Part of the problem with working in this workplace where I've been working for the past four months is that shitty state of tooling and the poorly-transmitted word-of-mouth culture of how things are done. For example, to make changes to the database, we make changes to the package files and then, at some point, run an in-house utility to move those changes to whatever database we are using to develop on. But that process blows away any test data we'd put in that database. So then people end up making changes to the database manually. But the only way to do that is to know what the changes were, which can be hard to know when there are four other developers working in the database. What I see is that I pull the latest code changes from the git repository, it now expects the database changes, so it breaks. But I don't know what those changes were. And if I run the house to deploy them, I will lose all my carefully-crafted test data.
So at some point today I decided to make a backup tool to save my test data before running the deployment tool. The tool would read a list of tables from an XML file and backup all the records in them to a text file. I'd never written a C# application from scratch, at least not one with a GUI, so I had ChatGPT do it. I explained what I wanted it to do and that I wanted it to be in C# and use WinForms. It dutifully spit out some code that, after a little back-and-forth, I managed to get to compile. And it did precisely what I wanted.
But that just provided a platform for me to stand on to see something else that it would be good to have. I then asked ChatGPT if it could make a recursive method that could follow foreign key relationships from records it had just backed up and also back up those records in related tables. ChatGPT made some noises like this wouldn't be a trivial task, but then spit out some code that, with a half hour or so of work, I had working. It was backing up all the related records as well. This was huge, since a big problem I'd encountered when inserting records into company databases was a web of foreign key constraints, which prevented the insertion of records pointing to non-existent records in other tables.
The day ended on that note, and I counted it as a win. I celebrated when I got back to Hurley by bringing a beer with me on the walk I took Charlotte on down the Stick Trail.
After that, I made a big vegetable soup built around potatoes, fresh kale and collard greens from the garden (from which I had to remove dozens of little caterpillars), sauteed onions, and canned tomatoes, green beans, and kidney beans. I'd squeezed a whole lemon into the soup, which ended up making it a bit too tart (I agreed with Gretchen on this). I'd also been a little gun-shy about adding salt, so it needed a bit more of that. But otherwise it was a great success and Gretchen and I both went back for seconds over the course of two episodes of Jeopardy! from our enormous backlog.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250730 feedback
previous | next |
