Engineering Blog

When a Referral Program Slows Down

A customer watched their referral numbers climb steadily for months—until it suddenly slowed down.

By the time we spoke, the frustration was clear. The team had invested real effort into building momentum, so the hiccup felt personal. Their first order of business was to regain control by making a few adjustments to the program.

As we walked through what had changed, the issue came into sharp focus. The program itself hadn’t failed, no. But the attitude around it had shifted.

The Importance of Writing Things Twice

In many domains, critical information is deliberately written down twice in two different places. While this might appear redundant, the practice is a safeguard against errors, loss, and failure. The underlying principle is simple: no single point of failure should be able to compromise the system.

20250911 Daily Scrum

Lost my laptop, possibly due to a virus, and now I have to rebuild it. Yeah, losing a laptop is hard. On the one hand, I have to be ready for such unfortunate events. And I actually am ready - I have a recent backup. I have non-recent backups, as well. Most important things are also duplicated in the cloud. Some heavy files like videos aren't backed up, but I'm actually not losing much there. And I managed to back up text files and important small files of the most recent days, via a tether. So I'm good, overall. 

[FIXED]: drush The specified database connection is not defined: default

Fixing this took me years... I can't believe how long it took. The answers on stack overflow did not help.

The error was due to a mismatching php configuration for running in the shell ( /etc/php/8.1/cli/php.ini ) and in apache (/etc/php/8.1/apache2/php.ini ).

Specifically, I had to enable short tags for the shell: 

short_open_tag = On

With that, this particular error was fixed, and I was off to fixing the next error!