Reminds me of the quintessential tweet about error messages https://twitter.com/cherrikissu/status/972524442600558594?s=...
One of the reasonable reasons why errors often get returned generically is because of security though.
What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages
21–30 of 137 posts
Re: What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages
#22I've had more than one intern or young engineer that I've had to teach to resist the urge to put witty comments and jokes in project docs, comments, or errors. Especially in error messages or things that can be exposed to users/customers. Even if it's an error you think only the dev team will see, you never know if it will make its way out to audiences you didn't intend. Somehow I doubt people faced with this error m…
> Somehow I doubt people faced with this error message really were amused by the reference to the old Amiga OS errors.... I'll bet whoever put that in there feels extra silly about misspelling "meditation", too.
It looks like the spelling was fixed a while ago, does that mean fastly is running an old version of varnish?
Re: What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages
#23But who's going to host that nice unicorn images? and those nice CSS? I agree with putting up a link tho.
We create separate 404 and 500 error pages. Question is - should we do this for most status codes?
Re: What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages
#24Reminds me of the quintessential tweet about error messages https://twitter.com/cherrikissu/status/972524442600558594?s=...
Right up there with Slack etcs fake loading messages "Gearing up the dildonator" "Implicating the fairies" "Hogtying George Bush" Dude - just give me a spinner or a progress bar, and if something errors during the load out give me some sort of stack trace or error ID I can use to help
The one I especially hated: "You look nice today"
1. "Nice" is an adjective with nearly zero meaning. 2. Either you have access to my camera outside of calls and are analysing my appearance (WTF) or you're making stuff up. 3. You're making chat software. Stop trying to butter me up.
Re: What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages
#25Have they published a post-mortem for the outage yet? I'm curious as to what happened here
They wrote that they had to reinstall Workbench.
Isn't that too early for pay mortem? I didn't experience it myself, but I think it happened at most few hours ago.
Re: What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages
#26So that looks like a stock Varnish 503. I'm pretty sure the magic behind fastly is a ton of Varnish cache. What's interesting (VCL can be unforgiving), also that it was a big central stuff up. Which makes me think they have layers and layers of caching in depth and some top level config just blacked out everything. I kind of would have thought they'd have lots of small instances.
This is not true
Edit: trying to reverse engineer the “magic”, architecture, and the failure from a varnish error message is folly, and misleads others. How do I know the comment is patently false? I ran those teams at Fastly for 3 years.
Re: What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages
#27Have they published a post-mortem for the outage yet? I'm curious as to what happened here
Here it is https://www.fastly.com/blog/summary-of-june-8-outage
Posted about 17 hours after the incident.
In short, a valid customer configuration change triggered a bug. One thing I don't see in this writeup is a commitment to ensure that customer configurations cannot break the whole system. Cloudflare does seem to make this promise with their zero trust architecture,
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/security/glossary/what-i...
Re: What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages
#28So that looks like a stock Varnish 503. I'm pretty sure the magic behind fastly is a ton of Varnish cache. What's interesting (VCL can be unforgiving), also that it was a big central stuff up. Which makes me think they have layers and layers of caching in depth and some top level config just blacked out everything. I kind of would have thought they'd have lots of small instances.
> So that looks like a stock Varnish 503
Looks like it, except that Varnish has it spelled “Guru Meditation”, not “Guru Mediation”. Anyone know why that would be?
https://github.com/varnishcache/varnish-cache/search?q=medit...
Re: What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages
#29I have a particular dislike for Apple over this - I think they set a trend of unhelpful error messages tied to obscure codes back in the 1990s.
Sadly they've been joined by Google. 'Something went wrong' could have come from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
Re: What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right up there with Slack etcs fake loading messages "Gearing up the dildonator" "Implicating the fairies" "Hogtying George Bush" Dude - just give me a spinner or a progress bar, and if something errors during the load out give me some sort of stack trace or error ID I can use to help
The one I especially hated: "You look nice today" 1. "Nice" is an adjective with nearly zero meaning. 2. Either you have access to my camera outside of calls and are analysing my appearance (WTF) or you're making stuff up. 3. You're making chat software. Stop trying to butter me up.
Nice reply, you’re on fire today!
No, really, you should find a fire extinguisher.