Another day at VaultPress has come to a close! Today was full of learning and great conversations with other automatticians.
9AM
I woke up and actually put on what I call “real people clothes”. This consisted of a nice pair of shorts and my Automattic t-shirt. I made coffee and grabbed my classic breakfast of two hard boiled eggs. Before I jumped into work, I read over a couple of articles that had been “tabbed” (opened in a new tab and left waiting for me to read). I then got carried away picking out positive articles for my Uplift Trove. Finally, I got caught up on some p2/o2 posts from the night before.
9:30AM
Midway through me cranking away at work, I received an email from the nonprofit I am meeting with next week. I found out they are only a 10 minute walk away from where I am in the city! I updated the person who has been managing the relationship to let them know that a time was now officially set up for me to meet with them.
10:30AM – 1:30AM
I discovered my first “stuck lock”. This is a fancy term that refers to something we put in place when restores are being run. Basically, we put a “lock” while restores are run so that no other process is completed while we are restoring a site. A stuck lock refers to when the lock isn’t removed! This obviously can cause some issues. Long story short, I had my first stuck lock and managed to successfully clear it and get the backups running again. Next, I tackled an intense security ticket with the help of the security guru on my team. Slowly but surely, I am getting better at deciphering security threats (read through this Wikipage on Shellcodes for a quick overview). All in all, the tickets were either really easy or really tough during this time frame.
1:30PM – 4:30PM
Thanks to Cloudflare’s decision to offer Universal SSL, I managed to discover a new error message today! I think the most fun part of the job is when I am able to “stump” a developer because it allows us to both learn something new. The developers on VaultPress are awesome about walking through what they are seeing and how they eventually come to a solution. For this particular problem, we had 4 out of 7 people working away to figure out the cause. Within 15 minutes, there was a new commit to our code that offered a fix! At this point, I snagged a quick bite to eat.
After working my way through more straightforward tickets, the next tough ticket I tackled involved a site showing 404 errors after restoring. With this ticket, I was able to learn a ton about the .htaccess file and how that affects permalinks (you can read more here). With a team effort, the issue was resolved!
Right at 4:30PM, we hit 0 tickets. When this happens, a GIF of a dancing man shows up. I quickly alerted the team about this little success of the day. I like to think that we all do our own dance at our respective work stations when this happens 🙂
4:30PM to 5:30PM
I jumped off to go workout at a local park near my parent’s house. I like to go around this time because it is typically not as hot and it is before the children come out to play with their parents!
5:30PM to 6:30PM
To end the day, I read through some P2/02 posts, caught up on some of the chatter on slack, and wrote this post.
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