The latest articles on DEV Community by knutt3 (@knutt3). https://dev.to/knutt3 https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4099199%2Fd178b18b-899c-4de4-ac78-16d9eeb0d061.png https://dev.to/knutt3 en knutt3 Sat, 29 Aug 2026 01:37:19 +0000 https://dev.to/knutt3/3-years-into-cs-and-still-not-sure-i-get-it-some-days-43mg https://dev.to/knutt3/3-years-into-cs-and-still-not-sure-i-get-it-some-days-43mg <p>anyone else feel like the more you learn the more you realize how little you actually know? third year of uni now, been grinding Java/Spring Boot stuff on my own for a while, and some days I feel decent about it and other days I look at my old code from 6 months ago and just cringe lol</p> <p>not really looking for advice, just curious if this is a normal phase or if it ever fully goes away. feels like the goalposts keep moving — first it was "just get something to compile", now it's "why is this architecture decision even correct"</p> <p>anyway back to debugging. hope everyone's week is going better than my terminal right now 😅</p> webdev productivity knutt3 Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:31:08 +0000 https://dev.to/knutt3/til-mysqladmin-ping-returns-exit-0-even-on-access-denied-our-backups-were-silently-broken-and-5bjk https://dev.to/knutt3/til-mysqladmin-ping-returns-exit-0-even-on-access-denied-our-backups-were-silently-broken-and-5bjk <p>so our mysql healthcheck is mysqladmin ping -uroot -p$MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD. i figured since we're passing the password it's actually checking auth too, right?</p> <p>wrong lol. turns out mysqladmin ping returns exit 0 even when it gets Access Denied back. apparently that's just how it works, the server responded so technically it's "alive", doesn't matter if it refused you. container's been sitting there green this whole time.</p> <p>meanwhile mysqldump is out here failing with Access Denied every single night and just writing a basically empty .gz file. our backup script does something like docker exec ... | gzip &gt; "$FILE" and with set -eu the script only cares about gzip's exit code, not mysqldump's. so gzip succeeds (it did its job, compressing basically nothing), script exits 0, everyone's happy except there's no actual backup.</p> <p>only found out because i needed to restore something for a totally unrelated reason and opened the file and it was tiny</p> <p>the part that actually got me a little freaked out: we prune old backups and only keep the last 7, and that runs right after every dump. so this whole time it was broken, every night it's writing one more empty file AND deleting one more good one to make room. if nobody had noticed for a week straight it would've just... quietly deleted every real backup we had, on its own, no crash no error nothing</p> sql