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No dogs were harmed in the making of this app

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Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app

#31

Post by s1artibartfast »

feintruled wrote: post #4

That's quite a tale, a parable almost about how software engineering differs from other jobs (I want to say 'real' jobs but tongue in cheek). I like this one too, it's even snappier. A software engineer, a hardware engineer and a department manager were on their way to a meeting in Switzerland. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of co…

Is the moral of the story that the hardware engineer is simply correct? - a mechanical engineer

Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app

#32

Post by ohthatsnotright »

deredede wrote: post #26
thedanbob wrote: post #18

> I sent a message to my friend, "Cracked it at last. It was the letter 'E'." Funny how the simplest, tiniest bugs are often the hardest to find. Just this morning I burned an hour or two hunting down an off-by-one error. Turns out it was an "index + 1" that I had forgotten to change when I refactored (facepalm).

As the saying goes, there are two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

You forgot Dates, Times and Timezones

Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app

#33

Post by skrebbel »

yafbum wrote: post #19

A physicist friend used to quote Rutherford, all science is either physics or stamp collecting. By which my friend meant, physics has a way of being checked by physical reality in a way that math or computer science don't. His area of work was extreme magnetic fields. Experimenting meant building giant copper coils, running enough current in them to melt them in place, and then very quickly detonating explosive aroun…

I used to wonder why Dijkstra was so arrogant, and then I learned that he graduated in theoretical physics.

Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app

#35

Post by ryandrake »

I always like to see upstream corrective action after something like this. If there was adequate logging / error reporting, this wouldn't have taken a week to fix. Whatever library he sent the invalid "image/jpg" MIME type to should have thrown an exception, crashed, or at the very least, logged loudly. I wonder if OP filed a bug against it.

Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app

#36

Post by kens »

yafbum wrote: post #19

A physicist friend used to quote Rutherford, all science is either physics or stamp collecting. By which my friend meant, physics has a way of being checked by physical reality in a way that math or computer science don't. His area of work was extreme magnetic fields. Experimenting meant building giant copper coils, running enough current in them to melt them in place, and then very quickly detonating explosive aroun…

That's a rather unusual interpretation of the quote. According to several books, the meaning of that quote is that science is either mathematical and quantitative, or descriptive. In other words, you're either attempting to understand the dynamics of the subject or merely collecting interesting facts and naming items of interest.

Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app

#37

Post by city41 »

Several times throughout my career I've been hit with something erroring and it just being silent and completely stumping us. No error output, nothing. In a lot of these situations, we were able to track it down to some low level third party library doing `catch (e) {}`. The first one happened early in my career, and it was a good lesson. I don't take any error for granted, at the bare minimum I log it. You just never know, your software could still be used 5 years from now and in a totally different environment than you ever imagined.

Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app

#38

Post by gcheong »

harrymit907 wrote: post #34
munchler wrote: post #27

The dog’s owner paid for surgery, but wouldn’t pay for an x-ray?

Cost to benefits probably. Vet X-rays are surprisingly expensive and then surgery had to be done anyway.

True but as the vet in the article states she couldn’t be sure that the extent of the problem was just the corn cob without an x-ray so to me it would seem more logical to take the x-ray once you’ve decided on surgery.

Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app

#39

Post by lostlogin »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #31
feintruled wrote: post #4

That's quite a tale, a parable almost about how software engineering differs from other jobs (I want to say 'real' jobs but tongue in cheek). I like this one too, it's even snappier. A software engineer, a hardware engineer and a department manager were on their way to a meeting in Switzerland. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of co…

Is the moral of the story that the hardware engineer is simply correct? - a mechanical engineer

No, it was a modern car and an unusual set of circumstances lead to a software bug occurring in the regenerative breaking. It needs further testing on that incline, at that time, in that weather with that weight in the car.

Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app

#40

Post by kill_nate_kill »

iainmerrick wrote: post #28
fatnoah wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a software engineer I always kinda enjoyed debugging. It allowed me to use a different skill and mind set than creating designs and implementing them. Same here. I always enjoyed the challenge of it, especially in complicated systems.

I always feel that debugging is much more of a science than normal software development. You need to spot unusual behavior, figure out ways to isolate and reproduce it, come up with hypotheses as to what might be happening, design tests for those hypotheses, run the tests, find the solution, test the solution -- exactly like the interplay of experimental and theoretical science.

... Detective work.

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