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Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

slack.engineering

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Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#61

Post by elpakal »

HiJon89 wrote: post #49
diarrhea wrote: post #11

That date format is actually the worst I have ever encountered. m-d-y, with year in 2 digits, numbers not zero-padded, US "order" yet using dashes. It's like a moderator of /r/ISO8601 came up with the worst possible format on purpose . Am I missing something?

I expected the top comment on hackernews to be something this pedantic and irrelevant to the content, and I was not disappointed

I had to read the parent comment twice to understand that it was talking about the date in the title of the post and not anything relevant whatsoever.

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#62

Post by ascar »

true_religion wrote: post #26
tjoff wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so tired of having to do that game every time I see a date. It is not hard, but it is quite annoying. Especially since it isn't solvable in a lot of cases, so you try to reason your way to the most realistic interpretation. It shouldn't be this hard.

It’s not really that hard. Like the imperial system, Americans just memorize how it works as children and don’t think about it anymore. Think about it like speaking a different language, except with numbers and not words.

> Think about it like speaking a different language

The correct analogy is I don't know which language is spoken and the same words get used in multiple languages with different meaning. Now I can apply heuristics to figure it out or in some cases I can only guess.

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#63

Post by smcl »

charcircuit wrote: post #33
diarrhea wrote: post #11

That date format is actually the worst I have ever encountered. m-d-y, with year in 2 digits, numbers not zero-padded, US "order" yet using dashes. It's like a moderator of /r/ISO8601 came up with the worst possible format on purpose . Am I missing something?

It's a shortened version of "February 22, 2022" It doesn't seem that bad to turn it into 2-22-22.

The issue is a great deal of the rest of the world don't do this, so you need to decide whether to apply best-guess heuristics to parse it or decide that it's a typo ("ah there's not 22 months, so maybe it's the 22nd of February or someone fat-fingered the 2nd of February...?").

In this case you can lookup Slack outages to disambiguate it, but the frustration here - and I share it - is directed at the stubborn refusal to use a standard format that the reest of the world has agreed upon.

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#64

Post by gleenn »

ksdnjweusdnkl21 wrote: post #58
gleenn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because people for hundreds of years have been saying "March second, nineteen sixty two" which they then write out in that order. As a programmer, peoples' frustrations are understandable, but you're a bit naïve if you think even a percentage point of the speaking population of the world knows or is concerned with big endian-ness or sortability. However they speak English, at least in America, in that order, and…

Have they not been doing the same with "fourth of July"? Or is this an exception?

Our Independence Day is probably a special case. Clearly language is flexible enough to say all the formats, but the date format we write matches the most common verbalization.

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#66

Post by 58x14 »

Just my personal take, I think this is a really well-written incident postmortem. It's specific, extensive, candid, and dare I say, entertaining?

Many incident reports are fully lacking in any meaningful detail, or wholly unapologetic. I actually enjoyed learning tidbits about the author, in particular their mention of https://how.complexsystems.fail/.

Reading this boosted my confidence in Slack's teams, which should ultimately be the objective of a release like this. It's not pure PR nor a gruff legally-obligated disclosure.

It helps that I wasn't really affected by this incident.

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#67

Post by mumblemumble »

ascar wrote: post #57
gleenn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because people for hundreds of years have been saying "March second, nineteen sixty two" which they then write out in that order. As a programmer, peoples' frustrations are understandable, but you're a bit naïve if you think even a percentage point of the speaking population of the world knows or is concerned with big endian-ness or sortability. However they speak English, at least in America, in that order, and…

> Europeans only got it a little better. There is a reasonable argument for little endian dates (as in the least significant information is usually the most relevant as it changes most often), but apart from the "it has been like this forever" I don't see any reasonable argument for middle endian date formats. Then again, the US is notoriously resistant to the metric system too.

Your error is expecting reasonableness. All linguistic conventions are either arbitrary or lost to time, and mostly only exist for tradition's sake.

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#68

Post by olliej »

I find reading about these incidents super interesting, and I generally find the work performed by the folk keeping these service running (and dealing with the inevitable falling over of any computer system).

At the same time it seems like a horrifying job I would never ever want :D

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#70

Post by vxNsr »

58x14 wrote: post #66

Just my personal take, I think this is a really well-written incident postmortem. It's specific, extensive, candid, and dare I say, entertaining? Many incident reports are fully lacking in any meaningful detail, or wholly unapologetic. I actually enjoyed learning tidbits about the author, in particular their mention of https://how.complexsystems.fail/ . Reading this boosted my confidence in Slack's teams, which shoul…

The fact that the current top comment thread is quibbling about the date format in the title seems to agree with this assessment, if there was anything real to complain about that’s what we’d be seeing, instead we get bikeshedding on the date format in the title of a post.
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