Interesting because hubski uses the same codebase; I could totally imagine making this mistake some day.
It's so painful when a mistake like this one gets masked by something else that you are doing. Sure. But thanks to you, we will stand a better chance of isolating it. :) I appreciate the way that pg shared this. IMO all too often people seem to adopt PR speak rather than just address users like you would anyone else.Interesting because hubski uses the same codebase; I could totally imagine making this mistake some day.
Yeah I've gone through this process several times now. At the start of a project I tend to be more impulsive. It can be very useful to just try things on the fly even if you risk breaking things. Over time the set of things you keep trying shrinks as exploration ceases and activities fall into a small number of predictable trajectories. Now they can be made less error-prone by some sort of web layer. However, as you rely on the new abstraction layer, one starts to forget the power that is still available below, and new requirements often go unfulfilled for a long time. Things that used to be obvious six months ago gradually turn into epiphanies. This is especially true if you bring in new people (like hubski brought me aboard); even if they're programmers they might get blinkered by the admin interface somebody showed them on the first day and not realize that they could look under the hood. My current opinion after these experiences tends to be against admin interfaces for things I don't do on a regular basis. Just creating new functions is good enough to deal with error-prone activities, and it doesn't let me forget that I'm dealing with code.
Ah, infinite loops in trees. My wife's computer still has an infinite directory loop on her laptop. We found out about it when we tried upgrading to Windows 7 and it failed. It's still there in Windows.old and probably will be until it dies.