The one where we were all the intern once

I know I promised chaos, but the HBO intern is providing enough chaos for one week

Jun 18, 2021

Integration Test Email #1

Just in case you’re not subscribed to HBO Max or you haven’t been on the Internet for the past 24 hours, an intern accidentally sent an integration test email to a subset of HBO Max customers titled “Integration Test Email #1”:

When you’re new to a job, this is literally one of the WORST things you feel that can happen to you. Whether it’s taking prod down for a number of hours or accidentally sending an email to a bunch of people and going viral on Twitter, it doesn’t matter. You don’t want to make mistakes, and you DEFINITELY don’t want to make mistakes people are going to notice. But here’s the thing.

When you’re early on in your career, you’re going to make mistakes. A lot of them. Some minor, some major. It’s a part of the learning process. I hope you find yourself in an environment that can laugh off a mistake such as this and help teach you what to do to avoid it in the future. But it’s SUCH a good lesson early on in your career. I’ve had my fair share of fuck ups in the workspace as well. I’ve taken a LOT of client sites down over time. (Oops.)

Besides, this intern is going to have one hell of a story to tell when they’re later on in their career.

One of the most important things I’ve learned is it’s so incredibly important to share with others the times when you screwed up. Times like this early on in your career are terrifying and feel like it’s the end of your job, but we all know it’s not. To normalize this, we need to share our own mistakes.

Besides, it could always be worse…

Kelly Vaughn 🐞

@kvlly

I would rather send Integration Test Email #1 than accidentally alert Hawaii that there is an incoming ballistic missile

9:40 PM - 17 Jun 2021

Shopify app development trials and tribulations

I’ve been continuing on my journey of learning React while building my first public Shopify app. Yesterday I hit a big project milestone and I’m thrilled to see it doing something instead of just collecting information. I’ve got today off work in observance of Juneteenth so I’ll probably be working on it all day today too. Because being “off work” is only an idea, apparently.

I will say that the importance of writing clear and useful documentation has been at the top of my mind while I’ve been stumbling my way through developing this app. I’m thankful for those in the app space who have been through this before and have either paired with me or guided me in the right direction (especially Dan Gamble).

I’m so excited to show you what I (and the rest of our small team) have been building! We’re hoping to submit it to the Shopify App Store in mid-July.

If you’re curious about this development process, I’ve been considering making my ~conference talk of the year~ walking through the process of developing a production-ready Shopify app with Node.js, Koa, React, and Next.js. Let me know if this would be at all interesting, and what specifically you’d want to see.