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Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

> If you need a hot fix "RIGHT NOW" you might be doing something wrong in the first place.

Can we please grow up beyond this kind of comment?

I suspect everybody knows that hotfixing production isn't an ideal thing to do, and the many reasons why that's the case, but lots of us nevertheless do it from time to time. Where I work now we've probably hotfixed production a handful of times over the past couple of years, amongst thousands of "proper" deployments. It's really not a big deal.

We know so little of the context behind OP's issues that picking holes isn't helpful or informative. The specific question was about migrating from containerized infrastructure back to a more traditional hosting model. I for one would be interested in reading about any experiences people have in this area so it's quite frustrating to find this as the top comment when it's substantially off-topic.

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>Can we please grow up beyond this kind of comment?

No platform that assigns quantitative virtue points to comments based on how many people agree with that comment will ever not have an abundance of people lobbing low-effort quips and dog whistles designed to appeal to the majority.

this happens in the workplace as well though

> this happens in the workplace as well though

Exactly this. I'm fortunate in that where I work now it's pretty rare: the culture is fairly collegiate and friendly, and there's a strong sense of "we're all on the same side". Other places I've worked every meeting has been an exercise in point scoring, which is incredibly wearing and - try as one might - the culture does end up influencing one's own behaviour.

You can obviously get preachy about how people should be stronger characters and not so easily influenced but the phrase "Bad company corrupts good character" exists for a reason. Unless you're Gandhi it's incredibly difficult for many people to resist the culture around them day in and day out without some positive reinforcement from the behaviour of others, especially when you're incentivised to do otherwise, and may be penalised for not doing so[0].

[0] The answer is, if you can, find another job. Not always an option, but a good idea if it is.

This should probably be the banner message when you arrive on this site. Well said.

Same experience here, for the last 4400 deployments over the last 4 years at my current job we had to do 3 live patch on production. This just happens in the real world. Last occurrence was 2 months ago when a deployment step that worked well several thousands of times failed in an unrecoverable state with our deployment pipeline.

Strong disagree, I've worked at/seen so many places that do deployments in reckless and awful ways that I don't think it's obvious to most people.

Even in this thread, the arguments "against" containers, a lot of these things have alternatives that are still better. For instance, ok maybe you need to make a hotfix, you're still better off just compiling a one-off image on a dev machine and deploying it (I used to be able to do this in like, 30 seconds), as compared to trying to edit files directly on the server. Especially if you have multiple servers.

Thank you!

You're absolutely right. There is no context outside of the few lines OP asked and the quote you highlighted shows a lack of real world experience.

Yes it's true the "right now" fixes indicate there is a problem, but in small shops it's generally the most reasonable approach. Now if you're on a team of 50 other people and you need to make "right now" fixes then there is certainly a problem. Neither of which any of us can know from the context.... but besides the point, that it's not even on topic.

I don't even think "right now" fixes necessarily indicate a problem in development approach. Sometimes unexpected things happen and you need a way to fix them quickly, without being bogged down by infrastructure.

A great example of this is using a production repl. It even served Nasa well (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17253459/what-exactly-ha...). Having to change your system on-the-fly is not always an indication of a poorly developed or managed system.

If the rate of unexpected things is "sometimes" and not "very rarely" it probably does indicate that there are problems with development, build process or something else in the infrastructure.

Most of us are building CRUD apps not sending people to the moon.

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