Cars N Code

Beware the Vibe-Berg

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 22:49:05 +0000

Beware the Vibe-Berg: Why a Great Demo Doesn't Mean You're Ready for Production

You know the feeling. The local build runs flawlessly. The UI is pixel-perfect, the animations are buttery smooth, and the core user flow works like a charm. You present it to the stakeholders, and the room lights up. "Wow, this is amazing! It looks completely done. Can we launch it to our 100,000 users tomorrow?"

Welcome to the surface of the Vibe-Berg.

It vibes. Everyone is happy. But underneath that calm, sunny water lies a massive, sprawling mass of cold, hard engineering reality.

Anatomy of the Vibe-Berg

When we build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or a proof-of-concept, we are usually focusing on the tip of the iceberg. We focus on what people can see and touch. But shipping a product to production requires an entirely different universe of skills.

Above the Surface: The "Vibe"

This is the sunny, low-stress zone. The proof of concept works, the stakeholders are cheering, and on paper, you are "Ready for Launch." It’s easy to look at a functioning frontend and assume the finish line is right there.

Below the Surface: The Production Reality

This is where the real architectural heavy lifting happens. To take that beautiful prototype and make it survive the harsh environment of the live internet, you have to submerge into deep-level software engineering:

Scalability & Load Balancing: Making sure the app doesn't melt when thousands of users hit it simultaneously.
Robust Security (SOC2, GDPR): Protecting user data, setting up firewalls, and ensuring compliance so you don't end up in the news for the wrong reasons.
Comprehensive Testing: Writing the unit, integration, and end-to-end tests to ensure a tiny frontend tweak doesn't quietly break the entire database.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Spinning up cloud environments reliably using tools like AWS and Terraform, rather than just clicking buttons in a dashboard and praying.
Monitoring & Alerting: Setting up systems to wake you up at 3:00 AM before your users realise the platform is down.

Enter the "DevOps-opus"

Behind every application that seamlessly transitions from a cool demo to a rock-solid production environment is a chaotic hero. We call them the DevOps-opus.

Armed with eight tentacles, thick glasses, and a dangerous amount of caffeine, the DevOps-opus lives entirely below the waterline. They are simultaneously managing database migrations, tweaking performance optimisation gauges, cleaning up technical debt, and wiring up CI/CD pipelines.

While the surface team is celebrating a successful demo, the DevOps-opus is quietly ensuring that the infrastructure is fault-tolerant, cost-effective, and secure. They turn the "vibe" into an enterprise-grade reality.

The Takeaway: Respect the Underbelly

There is absolutely nothing wrong with celebrating a great demo. Vibing your own creation is part of the joy of building things! But as teams, we have to stop mistaking a completed UI for a completed product.

Next time you're planning a roadmap, look beneath the waterline. Give your engineering and platform teams the time, resources, and respect they need to build the hidden infrastructure. Because it might vibe above, but reality is deep—and production ain't easy.

What’s the craziest thing you've ever had to build under the surface to save a "successful" launch? Let’s swap production horror stories in the comments below!

Gemini follow up

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 01:32:00 +0000

I decided to have another try via the Gemini app using vanilla 2.0 Flash and it's Image 3 integration and it did way better! I didn't make the same mistake of asking for fireballs. But it did manage to refine several times including fixing spelling.

First image

Final edit

Nice work Gemini!

Gemini 2.0 Flash image editing

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 23:51:00 +0000

Wow - long time between posts...

When I heard that Gemini had launched experimental support for iterative editing of generated images, I was keen to give it a try:

So far so good! But it needed to be more Eurovision!

Pretty good! He needs a name

Introducing Glow Bandit from Slovakia! Eurovision is all about the show, bring on the wow factor

Hmm, I was hoping for fireballs

Those don't look quite right

Geez, who turned out the lights

Oh dear, this is not going well

Well I guess his hair got brighter, shame he now has no face.

Ok, not quite so dark. Can we fix his face?

He's back in the dark again

Maybe if I ask it to think harder...

After that fail, I think we should go back to the start

We seem to be stuck with this monstrosity

Lets point it back to before things went bad

Maybe that's as good as it's gonna get. Let's see if we can get it to zoom an edited image and add detail

If at first you don't succeed...

LOL wut? The Sims - Eurovision edition. Lets see if we can make it more realistic

Ok, hands almost work. What's up with his shirt?

WTH?

In summary

Nurburgring covered in snow == perfect single seater conditions

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 00:36:00 +0000

Mango Cube

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 03:33:00 +0000

Can't wait for these to arrive so I can start doing some "internet of things" hacking!

MangoCube; the Pocket sized Arduino compatible board

Amazing lap of the Nurburgring

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Mon, 22 Sep 2014 00:21:00 +0000

An absolutely unbelievable lap of the Nurburgring in a Mclaren 12C GT3 during the 24hr race

Configuring Samsung WatchOn to control MySKY box

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Sun, 23 Jun 2013 22:57:00 +0000

Samsung WatchON is a free app that came on my Galaxy S4 that turns the phone into a multi-device remote. It also provides video on demand (but not in NZ it seems).

I successfully configured the Sony TV and Pioneer DVD player in our lounge, and proceeded to torment my wife by randomly adjusting the volume/changing channel/turning the TV off - good times!

However, I couldn't figure out how to add our MySKY HDi pay TV box as a device.

Turns out, they are made by Pace.

To add it as a device choose, Add Device, Set Top Box, Show other brands. Then find Pace and keep trying codes until the box turns on/off (I think it was about code 14 before it worked). Then presto! No need to find three remotes to use the TV, it can all be done from your phone!

The new Aston Martin Vanquish

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 04:07:00 +0000

Dream Cars: Koenigsegg

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 10:30:00 +0000

Great episode from Drive about Koenigsegg and how they build their amazing cars. Definitely worth the 30 minutes if you're a car fan. The engineering and original thinking they put into these beasts just blows my mind. Truely deserving of the term "super car"

Motorkhana Perfection

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 10:55:00 +0000

One day I'll get back to Motorkhana and hope to be half as good as his guy...

Amazing crash at Le Mans 24hr

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 22:43:00 +0000

I can't believe McNish walked away from this and no one behind that fence got killed!

Grails UI Performance Plugin - beware of uiperformance.html.compress

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 22:09:00 +0000

See: http://refactor.com.au/blog/grails-ui-performance-plugin-beware-uiperformancehtmlcompress-false

ShareYourLove.com is live!

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:15:00 +0000

Our latest Grails powered application is now officially live!

ShareYourLove.com is a creative community where you can upload images of what you love and view other people's loves to raise money for charity. It's a fundraising platform where you don't have to spend a cent of your own money - all donations will be 100% funded by our advertising partners.

Wow! Two car related posts in a row!

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:38:00 +0000

Here's some in-car footage from the Grafton Hillclimb. It's a short, tight course about 3 hours south of the Gold Coast. They hold 4 or 5 of these each year. Heaps of fun! I set a new PB this trip, beating my old best time by about 5 seconds thanks to better tires and suspension.

Check out Motorsport Photography for heaps of great shots of the events (including me!)

Finally something car related

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:49:00 +0000

So I've been very lazy with posting anything car related but finally have something interesting :) Here's some youtube video from my last two outings in the VR4. The first was to a track day at Queensland Raceway and the second was drag racing the following day.

Grails Amazon S3 0.7.4 Released

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:47:00 +0000

see http://refactor.com.au/blog/grails-amazon-s3-074-released

Grails WebTest Plugin 1.2.0 Released

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:15:00 +0000

See http://refactor.com.au/blog/grails-webtest-plugin-120-released

Grails Amazon S3 Plugin 0.6.3 released

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:23:00 +0000

See http://refactor.com.au/blog/grails-amazon-s3-plugin-063-released

Adding pagination to a Grails WebFlow state

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 03:17:00 +0000

I noticed a few unanswered questions relating to paginating a WebFlow state on the users mailing list and thought I'd post the solution I came up with for a Refactor project I was working on last week.

It basically involves splitting the behaviour into an action and a view state with a transition between them called 'paginate'

loadResults {
 action {
    def criteria = MyDomain.createCriteria(){
        eq('someField','someval')
    }
    flow.myDomainResults  = criteria.list([max: 9, offset: flow.myDomainOffset ?: 0])   
    flow.totalMyDomains = flow.myDomainResults.totalCount
    return success()
 }
 on('success').to('browse')
 on(Exception).to "handleError"
}
browse {
 on('paginate') {
    flow.myDomainOffset = params.offset
 }.to('loadResults')
 on('selectItem').to('someOtherState')
 //...
}

One point to note is that I use a criteria in order to get the totalCount property populated for me automatically so that I don't have to run a separate query. Also, the above only works if your domain class is Serializable, in my real application this wasn't the case so I stored a list of maps containing the properties I wanted to display instead of the list of domain objects.

Then in the view all we need to do is to pass the current page from the flow scope to the paginate tag. The paginate tag also contains an extra parameter in order to trigger the paginate event when the generated links are clicked.

<g:each in="${myDomainResults}" status="i" var="myDomain">
    <g:form action="myFlow">
        <input name="id" value="${myDomain.id}" type="hidden">
        URL: ${myDomain.url}
        <g:submitbutton name="selectItem" value="Select"/>
    </g:form>
</g:each>
<div class="paginateButtons">
   <g:paginate max="9" offset="${myDomainOffset}" total="${totalMyDomains}" params="${[_eventId_paginate:true]}" />
</div>

You can also see I render each item as a separate form with a hidden id field and a submit button to trigger the 'selectItem' event and move onto the next state.

I haven't tried messing with all the options for g:paginate to make sure they still work so please let me know if you find any problems with the above code.

Grails Amazon S3 Plugin 0.6 Released

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:29:00 +0000

Check out the Refactor blog for the details.

Grails JSR-186 Portlets Plugin Released

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Thu, 21 May 2009 00:43:00 +0000

Kenji Nakamura has taken the reins of my initial work on the Grails Portlets plugin and done an awesome job of refactoring it into more manageable sub-plugins.

You can now plug-in portal implementations with Pluto and Liferay supported initially.

JSR-286 will be supported when the underlying version of Spring used by Grails is updated to Spring 3.0.

Check it out at the Grails plugin portal.

Great work Kenji!

Grails Amazon S3 Plugin 0.5 Released

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Wed, 06 May 2009 01:00:00 +0000

The latest version of the Amazon S3 plugin has been released which incorporates the latest jets3t snapshot library (0.7.1-SNAPSHOT) which has improved compatibility with the Eucalyptus open source EC2/S3 clone and some bug fixes.

The plugin S3 event handling code was also updated to avoid stale object and optimistic locking exceptions being thrown by Hibernate.

WebTest Plugin 1.1.4.2 Released

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:43:00 +0000

A new minor release of the Grails WebTest plugin to allow the plugin to download the latest WebTest snapshot (which uses HtmlUnit 2.5 which fixes issues with testing JQuery 1.3.2).

It will download the latest snapshot by default when installed. If you would prefer the latest stable release (3.0) you can answer no when prompted.

Testing a JQuery-UI Drag and Drop using WebTest

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:34:00 +0000

Just a quick post regarding using WebTest with JQuery-UI Draggable and Droppable.
The way that WebTest performs a drag and drop is as follows:

from.mouseDown()
to.mouseOver()
to.mouseUp()

Note that there is no intermediate move events between mouse down on the thing you're dragging and mousing over the target element.
What this means is that you need to configure your Draggable to start dragging on mousedown without delay. You can do this by setting the distance and delay options to zero (delay is zero by default):

$('.block').draggable({distance:0});

WebTest will now be able to click and drag it correctly. Unfortunately due to HtmlUnits 'renderless' behaviour you cannot specify exactly where you want to drop it so if you require precise targeting to properly test your application you're out of luck.

Grails WebTest Plugin 1.1.4 Released

noreply@blogger.com (Lee) — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 01:47:00 +0000

Another WebTest plugin release, this time with some new functionality!

Soenke Sothmann has contributed a nice patch to allow you to run custom suites of tests:

run-webtest -suite=MyTestSuite

Note that under windows you will need to quote the -suite argument due to an issue with Gant's argument parsing e.g. "-suite=MyTestSuite"

import grails.util.WebTest

class MyTestSuite extends WebTest {

    static void main(args) {
        new MyTestSuite().runTests(args)
    }

    void suite() {
        new SomeTest1(ant:ant).suite()
        new SomeTest2(ant:ant).suite()
        // You could also load up certain tests based on naming conventions or annotations
    }
}

In addition to this patch, there were some bug fixes relating to running webtests under Hudson and also around setting a custom port when starting up the server.