Synchronizing with a remote SVN repository

We recently had a double hard-drive failure on our RAID 5 on our main server at work, and we lost our stuff. Our primary backup method of that system had completely failed due to the incompetence of some of the staff in our parent company that was completely beyond our control. It's only by the grace of the fact that our IT guy had an extra weekly backup that we were able to recover as much as we were. That said, it brought to light the need to have our own extra backups of our source code because we can't rely on the people we're supposed to be able to rely on to do the backups for us. We're now going to be creating our own copies of the SVN server on a semi-daily basis, and I've found instructions on how to do it on this awesome StackOverflow post. I'm just sorry I didn't know about this sooner.

Why you should always export your sources with your Java projects

With the advent of popular and widespread Maven 2 adoption, there's no reason you shouldn't be using it to build your open-source or closed source Java projects. With that in mind, it's dead easy to use Maven's 'source' plugin to automatically generate a separate JAR with your project's sources in it when you package and deploy your project. Posting the sources with your project not only allows other people to easily debug their code while using your project, but also serves as a backup in the event of a catastrophic failure of a computer hosting your code for which you did not have proper backup procedures already in place. In the event that you couldn't tell, that happened to me tonight.

Why you should write good software

Today at the company where I work, our remotely hosted server went down suddenly. Nobody know why, and then the shit started to hit the fan, with emails flying back and forth, and phones ringing off the hook in search of an answer to that one timeless question, WTF ? Of course, everything filtered towards me eventually because I'm considered responsible for the server (even though I'm no where near it and if I don't have a network connection to it, I can't do shit). After several phone calls back and forth between our former partners (who happen to be in the same building as our ISP and still maintain our server), and our ISP, and our firewall technician (who, oddly, is outsourced by our ISP and doesn't technically work for them), it was discovered that the machine was alive, but not responding to any network traffic, so the quickest and simplest solution was to just get somebody to reboot the machine. Eventually, one of our former partners' employees went down to the cage and rebooted the server. Later, in an email explaining what had happened, that same employee (who happened to be their sysadmin) explained that their DVD backup had frozen the whole box and that this situation had never happened before. (This during our peak period for the day).

Now, I can believe that (I've had weird shit like that happen to me, so I can't really bitch at the guy.) But it brings to mind the need for good software and why good software should be written : if you write software, and it fucks up, then the managers of those using your software don't see it as your fuckup, they see it as their employees' fuckup, and hold them responsible. I hate the thought of being one of those employees (and very nearly was one today). This has brought forth some small amount of Karmic inspiration to put more time into testing and finding those odd failure modes for my own software that you wouldn't think can happen, but can because you eventually hit an odd and unexpected set of circumstances. Just something to think about if you're a serious developer and you're reading this.