Test Driven

Preface

Seven years ago, in the midst of a global IT boom, programming shops of all shapes and sizes were racing like mad toward the next IPO, and the job market was hotter than ever. I had been pulled into the booming new media industry and was just starting my programming career, spending long days and nights hacking away at random pieces of code, configuring servers, uploading PHP scripts to a live production system, and generally acting like I knew my stuff.

On a rainy September evening, working late again, my heart suddenly skipped a beat: What did I just do? Did I drop all the data from the production database? That’s what it looked like, and I was going to get canned. How could I get the data back? I had thought it was the test database. ...