Noise from the Basement

This one I actually already knew but temporarily forgot about it so got to relearn it. In MySQL, and many other databases, updating the column with an ALTER statement will remove any properties not explicitly listed.

For example, say you want to update an MySQL database to support utf8mb4. This requires updating the existing string columns to utf8mb4 which my co-worker did in a script that looked like:

ALTER TABLE #{table} CHANGE #{column_name} VARCHAR CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci

I reviewed the pull request and didn’t catch the error even thought I been burnt by this alter column issue in the past. I guess my scar must have healed, or at least faded enough that I forgot about it.

Book: Sometimes you Win, Sometimes you Lean
Author: John C. Maxwell

My takeaway from this book had nothing to do with it’s premise: learning from your mistakes. Instead my takeaway had to do with writing. Specifically make sure your audience can relate to your example.

One of the first examples of making mistake in the book is when the author accidentally brings a loaded gun to the airport. You can read all the details here but in summary he was giving a handgun as a gift while on a trip. He flew home on a private plane where, after they landed, the pilot showed him how to load the gun (this part is only in the book). He put the gun in his briefcase and when he got home forgot about it. His next trip, on a public plane, he took the briefcase with the loaded gun to the airport. You can figure out what happened when he got to security.

Recently I created a CI build for the Introduction to ORM for DBAs presentation example code. One of the reasons I picked this code base was so I could try out Dependabot for the security alerts I’m getting.

The security alert is for the ASP.NET Core NuGet package. The same issue is listed multiple times because the code is duplicated several times for the various steps in the example.

Some notes so I remember how to fix this problem if it happens again and I don’t waste a bunch of time figuring it out right before a customer production release. Not a great start to my day.

This issue happened to me many moons ago when I first upgraded to VirtualBox 6 and Ubuntu 18. This is the second time so I better write down what I did so I hopefully remember if it happens a third time.

Our last EDMUG meetup was an excellent presentation about Azure DevOps. Azure DevOps reminds me of GitLab where it is more then just continuous integration (CI). It includes issues tracking, repositories, and continuous delivery. All pretty standard stuff.

However, one thing did jump out at me. The fact it had build built in images you could use to run the build on. Build images with Visual Studio pre-installed. They also have macOS X Mojave! No need to create you own build runner, either VM or Docker, like you do with so many other CI tools.