Not that I think we should go back, but I do miss the wildwest days of web development when it was still acceptable to FTP untested code straight to production.
For my first dev job we would develop on production using an FTP client to push up changes on save. One day I was writing an SQL UPDATE statement and I forgot to include a WHERE clause. I basically nuked the entire product DB and it took days to recover because it was also not unheard of to not have regular db back ups. No one really questioned it too much though. Stuff like that just happened from time to time back then.
I rarely ever use FTP today. I wonder if students learning to code today even know what FTP is? It was one of the first things I learnt when learning to build websites as a teenager, but I don't that's the case anymore.
It's kind of interesting how processes in tech have evolved as much as the technology over the last few decades. It's hard to think of a good usecase for FTP anymore, but just a couple of decades ago it was used everywhere. Is anyone still using it for anything?
The backend team in one of my previous jobs (around 2010) had an interesting file locking mechanism.
All the developer were sat around one table but you couldn’t see each other behind the dual screens. So every hour or so, somebody stood up to inform the team that he is going to be editing file xyz, so please don’t touch.
It wasn’t production though, everyone was just working on a shared staging system.
Only 5 years ago, we had an 'editing stick'. Only the person physically in possession of the editing stick was allowed to make edit the configs to our (early 90's vintage) SCADA system.
Frankly the system worked very well: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
We only got rid of the editing stick when the machinery in question was scrapped.
Im a youngin’ and I regularly use it to transfer Roms to hacked portable systems (psp, vita, 3ds, wii). It’s convenient to transfer larger roms this way.
I still use it to sync folders to my iPad (from Documents Readdle).
Since walled gardens don't leave much options open, it's basically either that or a cloud provider -- and no free cloud plan has enough space to store these folders.
So FTP wins easily this one. It's free with unlimited storage, always has been, always will be.
For my first dev job we would develop on production using an FTP client to push up changes on save. One day I was writing an SQL UPDATE statement and I forgot to include a WHERE clause. I basically nuked the entire product DB and it took days to recover because it was also not unheard of to not have regular db back ups. No one really questioned it too much though. Stuff like that just happened from time to time back then.
I rarely ever use FTP today. I wonder if students learning to code today even know what FTP is? It was one of the first things I learnt when learning to build websites as a teenager, but I don't that's the case anymore.
It's kind of interesting how processes in tech have evolved as much as the technology over the last few decades. It's hard to think of a good usecase for FTP anymore, but just a couple of decades ago it was used everywhere. Is anyone still using it for anything?