… a tale of chaos.
This week, I finished a project that I was working on. This was exciting, because I didn’t love the project, and I’m hoping to move on to something more interesting. I was very excited to finish my part of the project and submit my PR … I just had to wait for someone else who works on this project to be in to approve the PR.
Once the person I needed to be back from vacation was back, my PR was approved. Our awesome DevOps team has our CI/CD pipeline set up to automatically deploy the latest develop branch to our staging environment, so that process was started as soon as my PR was merged … and it failed. My first instinct would have been to go to the person who set up the infrastructure for this app … but he’s out on vacation.
After some investigative work, one of our DevOps engineers figured out the issue and solved it. The app deployed to the staging environment (yay!), but it still wasn’t working as planned. I knew immediately what the issue was, but it took a while to troubleshoot. Once we fixed it … the app still wasn’t working as planned. We discovered that it was because the machine that the staging environment lives on isn’t big enough for what we were doing. So we pushed the changes to the production environment (I know, terrible … but nobody is using this app in production, so it wasn’t as bad as it sounds … just not ideal). Still having issues and can’t figure out why. Things that work just fine locally on my computer aren’t working on our deployed environment. And since I didn’t design the app (and apparently don’t know as much about it as I should), I’m at a loss for how to troubleshoot.
Our next plan is to set up a VM environment where so that I can troubleshoot in an environment that is closer to the environment where the app lives. Hopefully this will help. But even if it doesn’t … I learned an important lesson. I learned that while it’s always great to be able to ask for help, sometimes the person whose help you need is not available, so you have to learn to work on your own … and of course, consult with the other people who are available to see what they can do to help.
I leave for a week-long vacation on Wednesday, so I have two days to figure this out. Hopefully I’ll get everything fixed. But even if I don’t … I will have learned a lot about the app I’m working on, which is always a good thing.
