alt Hacker News> The workflow on election night, from my couch: edit some JSON, VPN into the NBC network, SSH into the server, git pull from master, pm2 restart all, text the producer that it's updated — then watch my change go out on air a few minutes later through Hulu. Doing that live in an emergency and seeing it on television minutes later is a pretty cool feeling.
Less "cool" and more asking for trouble if you make one misplaced comma, quote, or curly brace. The entire apps crashes and shows nothing to the broadcast audience or worse an error screen they'll screencap and meme.
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That part stood out to me too. However this article was from 2018, not last week it seems to me.
We did live debugging like this at the time, wouldn’t today.
Maybe they have the CI even if not the CD…?
Yeah I hope that’s a simplification. At the very least I hope some automated testing is scanning that code change in a PR before it gets pulled down to the server.
> worse an error screen they'll screencap and meme.
Or even worse, you misattribute a result to the wrong candidate, it gets screencapped and used as evidence in another “election fraud” conspiracy theory.
I actually think the safety guards they’d add for software like this would be the more interesting part of the story!
True but on election night you’re just changing things from null to one of two strings.
I’ve spent 17 years in news and it’s not uncommon to operate short term journalistic stuff off a Google sheet or xml file. It’s basically fine.