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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

A old supervisor of mine told me that "You treat a new developer like a duckling near a pond with Northern Pike". There is no way you let them have access to production (or frankly, anything past a development environment) until they have been there a while and gotten the hang of it.

On a tangent, I was paranoid enough in one position to have all my production terminal windows have a red background with yellow text. That brought the proper, serious attitude towards my work.

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That's not paranoid! That's a fantastic thing to do and one that I highly recommend for anyone. It's terribly easy to forget which environment you're working in when you get distracted for a moment and that's how mistakes happen.

I went the whole nine yards on that project. I had white (black font) for my own machine, green for development, blue for integration test, yellow for system test, and red for production.

I liked the green / white text theme the most with blue being my second favorite to write code in so those got the ones I would use the most. I was never a lover of the old amber terminals and red is just plain painful to write on. I guess the more pain your terminal causes you, the more dangerous the environment.

Was it automated? If so, how?

It doesn't help the terminal itself, but changing your ~/.vimrc to use different themes can help.

I have a similar setup, and it is relatively easy to set up using .bashrc and terminal color variables.

I did something similar with a shell script for MySQL databases, both to support shorthand invocation (i.e. "mysql foo-bar-baz" to look up the named configuration, expand it into whatever set of arguments is defined therein, and invoke mysql(1) accordingly), and to allow for detailed and environment-specific prompts which warn me when I'm targeting production.

It's hideous, of course. But it works very well for me, and I don't suppose I'd be averse, if interest becomes evident, to sharing it somewhere for others to benefit from and/or peruse in horrified fascination.

It's more hideous than I remembered! But for anyone interested, here you are:

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8ec128e88dac85d93ed58fb518...

Outside GNU coreutils, the only dependencies are mysql(1) (of course) and jq(1), which is more or less "awk for JSON" and which I strongly recommend to anyone who regularly deals with that file format.

Share and Enjoy!

Use config management to render the proper shell config per user.

I cannot remember the terminal program, but I had a file that set the colors and logged me in to the environment then set a bunch of variables. I was on a NT then 2000 box. Might have been a version of teraterm.

I use a little shell script to send iTerm2 proprietary escape codes to change the color of the terminal window based on the value of $*.

https://iterm2.com/documentation-escape-codes.html

It may not be a coincidence that you preferred the green with white text theme the most. [0]

[0] https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/3871/which-shade...

Interesting link. I chalked it up to a misspent youth on green terminals, but I do like the idea its really science.

Indeed. The difference between an experienced person a naive one is not that the experienced person doesn't make mistakes, but that they fully expect to make mistakes so they take precautions to mitigate their effects, take measures to prevent them, and minimize doing work that is mistake-prone.

Inexperienced folks really haven't had that "oh hell" moment of contemplating what could go wrong and the experience to know how bad it can go wrong.

I was at a site when a truck hit the power main and the UPS (diesel if I recall) for the server room failed to work. The new people were in the "It shouldn't take too long to reboot the servers" where the experienced people were "this is going to be a very long day". The later group was rewarded with a 36 hour day.

I definitely color my production terminals orange (and QA/staging get purple), and it's saved me a few times. I wouldn't consider NOT doing that.

I really like having a strong, visual indicator when you're doing something dangerous, as well.

I had a job where we would often sudo as other users and ssh into other boxes. I kept trying and trying to find a way to change the terminal when sudoed as someone else because occasionally I would execute something in the first terminal I could grab. At the time I couldn't find anything or think of a way.

Apparently Northern Pike can eat ducklings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_E4BUt1z8Y

Yep, fairly horrific. They will also attack a swimmer for no apparent reason other than they are an evil, foul-tempered fish. The bigger ones can make you bleed quite quickly. River barracuda is a name I heard once.

An old team did a similar thing! A terminal window with a skull and crossbones when you log into anything that's ".prod.X.com".

DBVisualizer has a setting that lets you designate different color schemes for different databases. It's saved me more than once.

I think TOAD has as well.

And here I was just put "(production)" in $PS1...

Try this:

    export PS1=$(tput bold; tput setaf 1;)'(production)'$(tput sgr0)' \u@\h: \W $ '

and get something a little more lively! (For many more things you might be able to do with "tput", refer to "man 5 terminfo" on your local Linux machine.)

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