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I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

helmstedt.dk

41–50 of 94 posts

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#41
post #38
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely understand why you see this as a 30-min fix, and therefore they should just knock it out. That's not how they would likely see it. If their devs are 100% utilized (which I'm sure they are), then fixing any issue -- even a 30-min one -- is going to mean that a different issue is delayed. The question becomes this: at what point is fixing this issue more valuable to the company than any other issue the sam…

You rationalize dysfunction into a strategy. It's not like they are doing Moon landing there 24/7. It's a simple bug with direct impact on the revenue. They should take a half hour break and fix it.

I think you vastly oversimplify how easy this fix is likely to be. For all we know this may mean touching code in multiple repos, each with hard-coded lists of which cards are supported for some case or another. At least that is what it would mean to change something like this where I am now.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#42
post #41
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You rationalize dysfunction into a strategy. It's not like they are doing Moon landing there 24/7. It's a simple bug with direct impact on the revenue. They should take a half hour break and fix it.

I think you vastly oversimplify how easy this fix is likely to be. For all we know this may mean touching code in multiple repos, each with hard-coded lists of which cards are supported for some case or another. At least that is what it would mean to change something like this where I am now.

Oh wow, editing a hard coded list. Does one need a chisel for that?

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#43
post #31
post #8

This is the problem I had in mind when building https://chota.link . I have seen too many broken previews. This little app lets you create short link and specify metatags. Try this short link on LinkedIn: https://chota.link/jVZ2Hd . I tested it and seems to be working.

Any reason on the name? Chota is a despective way to say "Penis" in South America.

In Hindi, Chota means short. Apologies to South Americans.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#44
post #38
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely understand why you see this as a 30-min fix, and therefore they should just knock it out. That's not how they would likely see it. If their devs are 100% utilized (which I'm sure they are), then fixing any issue -- even a 30-min one -- is going to mean that a different issue is delayed. The question becomes this: at what point is fixing this issue more valuable to the company than any other issue the sam…

You rationalize dysfunction into a strategy. It's not like they are doing Moon landing there 24/7. It's a simple bug with direct impact on the revenue. They should take a half hour break and fix it.

It's not just about time, but focus as well.

Other tasks might also be more critical to revenue generation.

At the end of the day, there are always going to be some issues left by the wayside so I think you really have to pick your battles.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#45
post #34
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reason on the name? Chota is a despective way to say "Penis" in South America.

Interesting, in (southern?) Brazil it refers to the female genital.

In Hindi, Chota means short...

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#46
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You rationalize dysfunction into a strategy. It's not like they are doing Moon landing there 24/7. It's a simple bug with direct impact on the revenue. They should take a half hour break and fix it.

It's not just about time, but focus as well. Other tasks might also be more critical to revenue generation. At the end of the day, there are always going to be some issues left by the wayside so I think you really have to pick your battles.

It's a 100% reproducible, mentally unchallenging, revenue impacting bug, which is frankly a rare combination. There is no excuse in not fixing it, unless you imply the thousands of Tinder devs are in core meltdown situation all the time.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#47
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is what the cost of that fix would be. Once the ticket reaches the developer it's probably quickly done and pays for itself with a handful registrations. However getting from support to a developer is the complex part. (Support has to understand the issue and then it has to be routed to the correct team ...)

I completely understand why you see this as a 30-min fix, and therefore they should just knock it out. That's not how they would likely see it. If their devs are 100% utilized (which I'm sure they are), then fixing any issue -- even a 30-min one -- is going to mean that a different issue is delayed. The question becomes this: at what point is fixing this issue more valuable to the company than any other issue the sam…

Fixing an issue around being unable to pay with a credit card is likely anything but a 30 min issue, unless there is some triviality happening, like a config issue. But even then you need to add tests for this. A day or two is the absolute minimum and that would be if this is just a config issue. If it's not, then think of weeks.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#48
post #35

Working with internationalized URLs (IRIs) is a Cursed Problem. Here is the IRI for the Wikipedia page on semiconductors. When you click on it, it should show you a page with a picture of a silicon wafer on the left. https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/شبه_موصل Now try copy/pasting that link text into different web apps and see how they respond. HN seems to handle it correctly. Twitter doesn’t, it considers شبه_موصل to be…

That's really a problem of picking up a url/uri/iri in text without delimeters. You see the same thing when there's 'uncommon' ascii characters in urls, like a trailing period, or commas or exclamation points. The proper thing to do is to enclose links in , as was done in well-formed email, but that wasn't super consistent either, and it hasn't transitioned to the world conciousness.

I don’t want to rely on users figuring out how to use delimiters. If the URIs with trailing periods break, so be it, people can use , but don’t make people use just because the URL isn’t English.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#49
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely understand why you see this as a 30-min fix, and therefore they should just knock it out. That's not how they would likely see it. If their devs are 100% utilized (which I'm sure they are), then fixing any issue -- even a 30-min one -- is going to mean that a different issue is delayed. The question becomes this: at what point is fixing this issue more valuable to the company than any other issue the sam…

Fixing an issue around being unable to pay with a credit card is likely anything but a 30 min issue, unless there is some triviality happening, like a config issue. But even then you need to add tests for this. A day or two is the absolute minimum and that would be if this is just a config issue. If it's not, then think of weeks.

It should be fairly trivial.

From the issue as described, the value "visa" worked, but "visadankort" didn't. Denmark's earlier, national debit card system is called DanKort. Nowadays, almost all DanKort cards are issued through Visa, so they are "Visa DanKort" -- within Denmark, there's the option to bypass some sort of fee for a lower cost of processing.

Presumably the value "visadankort" is there to distinguish these cards. However, they can be processed exactly as normal Visa cards.

This is not unique to Denmark, there are a list of card prefixes like this (see 4571 for DanKort[1]), but perhaps the different processing fees in unusual.

[1] https://www.stevemorse.org/ssn/List_of_Bank_Identification_N...

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#50
post #38
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely understand why you see this as a 30-min fix, and therefore they should just knock it out. That's not how they would likely see it. If their devs are 100% utilized (which I'm sure they are), then fixing any issue -- even a 30-min one -- is going to mean that a different issue is delayed. The question becomes this: at what point is fixing this issue more valuable to the company than any other issue the sam…

You rationalize dysfunction into a strategy. It's not like they are doing Moon landing there 24/7. It's a simple bug with direct impact on the revenue. They should take a half hour break and fix it.

How is it dysfunction to keep your devs focused on the tasks you've already identified as the most important?

I can't imagine how producing a PR for this with test cases, getting it reviewed, then shepherding through a typical QA/Staging/Prod pipeline would take less then a day for any code base of reasonable complexity.

Perhaps it wouldn't literally take 8 hours, but the focus shift of working on this would likely keep a dev from making much progress on other issues that day.

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