A New Beginning, Part 13

Kalen Hammann
Jul 30, 2017 · 3 min read

“COULD HACKERS BE BEHIND THIS?!”.

It had occurred to me when my pictures disappeared and I was suddenly having trouble getting to Heroku that it was just possible that a bunch of hackers had attacked both Heroku and Amazon S3 — the service in the cloud where my pictures were stored.

I even floated that idea on the forum — which got me the response “It’s not likely anyone would want to hack your app. Run the commands I told you to run!”

Well, delusions of grandur notwithstanding, I’d never thought anyone would want to hack my personal app. But Amazon S3? That would be a much juicier target. And of course, Amazon S3 could be having problems that had nothing to do with hacking.

Either way, when I found that the pictures were missing from my local app, problems at Amazon S3 seemed even more likely to be behind it.

“DESTROY THEM ALL!”

I remembered that the error message I had gotten about the Heroku API being temporarily unavailable had also included a line that “for more information” I could go to a certain website. I’d ignored it, imagining that it was just going to announce that they were working on the problem and maybe give an estimate of when they would be done. But now I checked the site and Bingo! They said they were having trouble with… Amazon S3.

I left a message to that effect, suggesting that we could probably forget about the problems with the pictures and just wondering why my code that fixed the bug locally had not fixed it on Heroku as well.

Ken responded with a single dreadful line of code. He said the problem probably was that I had deleted a “place” on my Heroku app before uploading the code that would keep the app from breaking. The easiest solution? I should run this code on the Heroku console: Comments.destroy_all.

I should destroy every comment in my database.

SMOOTH SAILING AT LAST.

It wasn’t actually all that bad. I just went through all the places copying the comments and pasting them on a page in my wordprocessor. Then I destroyed all the comments and copied and re-entered them. One at a time. Still, it didn’t take long and THEN…

Then my app was finally working. EVERYTHING was working. It even went on working when I held my breath and deleted a “place.”

And to me, it was absolutely beautiful. It’s essentially a clone of Yelp, with a focus on places that foster health, personal growth, and a better world for all of us.

If you like, you can check it out yourself. Just Click Here.

In fact, please do. If you’ll sign in with your email address, you can even add a place you’ve found that enriches your life. When you add a comment about the place, you’ll get an automatic email that someone has commented on a place you suggested. I won’t use your email address in other ways or share it with anyone else, but I’d love to hear about places you’ve found helpful.

(More to come… click here!)

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