41–50 of 137 posts
I think the majority know what 404 is, and possibly 403, but I agree about the more obscure ones.
That said, I don't think it's a bad idea to rely on the "default exception handling behaviour" that the majority of users, even non-computer-literate ones, will have: they'll retry a few times, see that it doesn't work, and go elsewhere for a while.
Good error messages are hard. There’s so many things that can go wrong, and each needs its own custom explanation. Never really found a good way to organize this. And since errors should be uncommon, it feels like a waste of time coming up with thoughtful messages.
Good error messages have a template: a UUID, a description, and a suggested solution. This gives folks enough to try to solve it themselves and also enough to Google / grep with.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Embed both in the page.
I suspect most folks, especially ones which operate at GB/s rates serving traffic would not like to serve up a 100kb base64 encoded image every time an error is thrown.
I 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Embed both in the page.
I suspect most folks, especially ones which operate at GB/s rates serving traffic would not like to serve up a 100kb base64 encoded image every time an error is thrown.
So 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that you have to know exactly what has gone wrong to show a proper message. But if you know what is wrong, most of the time the correct action is to fix the program so it does not go wrong instead of showing a better error. With the main exception of user submitted data validations where it is up to the user to submit correct data. For the average web service, there the error is a stack trace and there…
Even if there’s usually nothing the user can do I still like to have all the stack traces, etc visible - because sometimes there’s enough of a hint that you can get a workaround. A number of DNS failures I’ve worked around with the hosts file.
I'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…
Reminds 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
> Without good products, life would be a mistake.
> Make products that matter.
> Product excellence isn't a point in time. It is a state of mind, it is a way of life.
> So many feature requests, so little time.
Maybe they're being silly? I hope so. But I've also met product managers and designers who seem to think like that. It makes me internally sigh every time I have to use their product.
Reminds 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