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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

#91

Post by [deleted] »

gleenn wrote: post #54
jonpurdy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to complain specifically about this. 2022-02-22 is unambiguous, big endian, and sorts nicely. IDK why society still uses any other date formats considering how international everything is.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#93

Post by sverhagen »

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.

So, European in the US, here. I switch my dates stubbornly to DD-MM-YYYY, 'cause that's the only way. Of course I would. But then there's so many US applications that don't adhere to my settings and use MM-DD-YYYY. So then I am still deciphering 05-07-2020-kind of stuff. All. The. Freakin'. Time.

:)

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#94

Post by a4isms »

gleenn wrote: post #54
jonpurdy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to complain specifically about this. 2022-02-22 is unambiguous, big endian, and sorts nicely. IDK why society still uses any other date formats considering how international everything is.

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…

I write it in that order some of the time… But when I do, I spell out the month because when I say “I was born on June 14th, 1962,” I don’t say I was born on 6/14/62. I also never say 14/6/62. In fact, I almost never say a month’s number in conversation.

If you want to write it out the way it’s spoken, write it out the way its spoken. Mixing the computer’s numbers and the spoken word’s grammar make for misunderstandings, and as a programmer, eliminating misunderstandings is one of my goals.

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#95

Post by dormando »

bognition wrote: post #88
dormando wrote: post #44

Now a more philosoraptor style comment: I see Mcrib is a service built to quickly detect and replace memcached's. I treat memcached in infrastructure as a very stable service. Meaning it is infrequently necessary to upgrade it, and it will generally not fail on its own. If it does it will be highly infrequent compared to services with higher churn or more complexity/dependencies. This means if they're failing often e…

It’s likely that the memcached install is so large that the underlying instances themselves are failing. When you have hundreds or thousands of instances, failures in the instances themselves become pretty regular.

I can say with certainty this isn't strictly true. The failures should be relatively rare; when I say relatively I mean on the level of natural node failure. If natural node failure isn't survivable without special systems to quickly replace downed nodes you don't actually have an N+1 redundancy system. Thus, the pools aren't large enough :) Or, in this case, if they really are failing this much then having them always lose their cache is a major reliability hole.

It's a subtle difference. I think many operators get used to node failures being extremely common when they don't necessarily have to be. I suspect the note on "if they come back on their own ensure they're flushed" meaning they have something unusual causing ephemeral failures. If that's just "cloud networking" there isn't much they can do but it's almost always fixable.

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#96

Post by chrisseaton »

gleenn wrote: post #64
ksdnjweusdnkl21 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> people for hundreds of years have been saying "March second, nineteen sixty two"

In many other English-speaking countries people usually say "the second of March, nineteen sixty two."

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#97

Post by bumblebritches5 »

jonpurdy wrote: post #31
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?

Came here to complain specifically about this. 2022-02-22 is unambiguous, big endian, and sorts nicely. IDK why society still uses any other date formats considering how international everything is.

No post body was provided.

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#98

Post by skeletonjelly »

gleenn wrote: post #64
ksdnjweusdnkl21 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty funny America's most patriotic day is an edge case for something culturally American

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#99

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

vxNsr wrote: post #70
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.

Well that commenter's username is 'diarrhea' so...

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#100

Post by mistrial9 »

gleenn wrote: post #54
jonpurdy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to complain specifically about this. 2022-02-22 is unambiguous, big endian, and sorts nicely. IDK why society still uses any other date formats considering how international everything is.

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…

plus plus to pragmatic - I have settled on 02feb2022 to write, and I do. Occassionally that finds its way into computer programs around here.
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