Story HN: Move fast and don't break things

1 point

12 years ago

I fucked up because I was too interested in moving quickly and didn't even stop for a minute to make sure what I was launching worked correctly. As a result I lost out on doubling the size of my mailing list.

I made a small game where you have to guess if headlines are real articles from TechCrunch or something that happened in HBO's "Silicon Valley". At the end of the game I had a form to join my mailing list. The page the mailing list form points to is hosted on my personal domain, and at the time I'd planned on putting the game on it's own domain (I later decided not to), so I had to set the form method to GET.

However at the time my Node.js/Express app on my personal site was only set up to accept POST requests. The relevant code is below:

    app.post('/joinlist', function(req, res) {
        var email = req.body.email;
    });

I simply changed `app.post` to `app.all`, meaning the function would now be called for any kind of request to "/joinlist".

    app.all('/joinlist', function(req, res) {
        var email = req.body.email;
    });

Thinking that was taken care of, I published the game and shared it on the interwebz[0]. I actually hosted it on a sub-domain on my personal site, but that's irrelevant. This morning I checked my mailing list database and saw many entries with the email field empty. It turns out the `req.body.foobar` method in Express is ONLY for POST data. If I want to capture both POST and GET parameters I need to use the `req.param('foobar')` method. I quickly fixed my code, but the damage was done. The game I made hadn't gotten too much attention, so truthfully I didn't lose out on TOO many sign ups, but I had a small mailing list to begin with and this would have nearly doubled it.

T'was a minor but frustrating experience and I thought I'd share.

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/2hggcx/i_made_this_game_can_you_tell_the_difference/