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Back in the day $440M loss due to coding error was a landmark warning case. How could this happen?? In 2021 alone something like $10B was lost due to bugs in defi land. Something about the worst possible thing could happen tends to happen eventually and it gets worse every passing year.
The OP details how poor software engineering practices brought down a 1.4B market marker with 1400 employees in 2012. Some of the issues mentioned include: - Keeping synthetic test data generation as part of a production build. - Keeping dead code for years. - Re-purposing a feature flag. - Refactoring without regression tests. - Manual deployments without peer reviews. They forgot to update one of their servers with…
Back in the day $440M loss due to coding error was a landmark warning case. How could this happen?? In 2021 alone something like $10B was lost due to bugs in defi land. Something about the worst possible thing could happen tends to happen eventually and it gets worse every passing year.
Its so obvious that those people have no clue whats going on in the markets they respect. Truth be told, many of them dont like markets at all. So its just a lack of exposure and compounded ignorance.
Back in the day $440M loss due to coding error was a landmark warning case. How could this happen?? In 2021 alone something like $10B was lost due to bugs in defi land. Something about the worst possible thing could happen tends to happen eventually and it gets worse every passing year.
I actually always think of the Knight case and similar ones when people see a DeFi organization have an issue and extrapolate that to an issue with the entire DeFi concept. Its so obvious that those people have no clue whats going on in the markets they respect. Truth be told, many of them dont like markets at all. So its just a lack of exposure and compounded ignorance.
The OP details how poor software engineering practices brought down a 1.4B market marker with 1400 employees in 2012. Some of the issues mentioned include: - Keeping synthetic test data generation as part of a production build. - Keeping dead code for years. - Re-purposing a feature flag. - Refactoring without regression tests. - Manual deployments without peer reviews. They forgot to update one of their servers with…
at the end .. its just money going from one account to another right? Its not like some physical thing that has perished and cant be brought back. Why is it difficult to reverse the transactions?
Imagine how pissed you'd be if you made money off Knight's mistake and it all just disappeared the next day.
Knight Capital Says Trading Glitch Cost It $440 Million - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4329101 - Aug 2012 (90 comments)
The OP details how poor software engineering practices brought down a 1.4B market marker with 1400 employees in 2012. Some of the issues mentioned include: - Keeping synthetic test data generation as part of a production build. - Keeping dead code for years. - Re-purposing a feature flag. - Refactoring without regression tests. - Manual deployments without peer reviews. They forgot to update one of their servers with…
I worked in algo trading for years, eventually got out because quite frankly the level of risk I was carrying on my shoulders everyday for what I was being paid were just way out of whack, I at least personally never got the huge pay days that people talked about until after I left finance for more pure tech. Interestingly, I worked at Knight and my team pioneered trying to blow up the firm, but that was in 2004, and…
The OP details how poor software engineering practices brought down a 1.4B market marker with 1400 employees in 2012. Some of the issues mentioned include: - Keeping synthetic test data generation as part of a production build. - Keeping dead code for years. - Re-purposing a feature flag. - Refactoring without regression tests. - Manual deployments without peer reviews. They forgot to update one of their servers with…
There is a much more serious focus on having a defense in depth, and making sure that problems like this are noticed before they become an issue. Rollbacks are no longer the first action when something goes wrong: the kill switch comes first.
Dead code, tech debt, repurposed flags, and spotty test coverage are everywhere still.