[Hello HN: You can read the discussion and comments here]
[I also want to preface this whole post by saying that I’m a Junior Developer with less than one year of actual experience. Some of the things that might seem obvious to some might not be so for me, thanks!]
This is a story that some won’t understand. It involves bad practices and errors from multiple parties in a world that might seem foreign to the “Silicon Valley” world but paints an accurate picture of what development is for small IT companies around the world.
I’m currently working at a tiny development company (10 employees) in Italy. We develop and manage websites and tools for local businesses. Other than that we landed a big contract for one of the biggest gym companies in Italy, the UK and South Africa. You might expect that given the size they know what they’re doing, but that’s hardly the truth. It’s easy to point the finger and accuse someone, but that’s not what I will be doing here (especially since we all make mistakes and bad decisions as you will see) so I just want to objectively describe what’s going on.
The project
I’m under an NDA, so I can’t disclose too much, but it suffices to say that we’re currently working on a project that needs to use videos hosted on Vimeo. Currently the company uses VimeoOTT, a platform that provides a stock frontend for the content, and they wanted to migrate to Vimeo Enterprise. There were roughly 500 videos on VimeoOTT that had to be transferred to Enterprise and Vimeo doesn’t provide an easy way of doing it. I wrote to the support team around October asking them if it was possible to do a migration, and they told us that they “will look into it” without letting us know anything ever since.
This meant that the upload had to be done again. I proposed to build a custom API script that downloads videos from OTT and uploads them to Enterprise (and our product as well) but the proposal was rejected by the management, and they decided to pay a person to do it manually instead. During the months following October said person uploaded the 500 videos from OTT + 400 new ones, thus reaching around 9TBs out of the 11 granted to us with the Enterprise plan, all was going well (even if it wasn’t really efficient). Then April arrived.
The problem
At one point, without letting us know anything, Vimeo decided it was a great idea to comply with our request and dumped all the videos present on OTT onto the new platform. No questions were asked, and apparently no one at Vimeo cared that
- They were duplicating videos that were already uploaded.
- The total size of the videos was now around 15TB, 4 over the limit.
This meant that unless we deleted stuff no one was able to upload videos anymore. We asked Vimeo if it was possible to revert the change, but we received a negative answer. The worst part? We had to go live in about a week.
It was time to delet
