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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

#41

Post by zoogeny »

This reminds me of a colleague I had that would often say "we aren't making air-traffic control systems here". The implication being that no lives were on the line if we made a mistake. This was when I was making games but it also applies to just about every CRUD app I've written.

Tangentially, one thing I often ask other senior technical leaders (especially Director, VP or CTO) is: what is the most costly mistake you have made? If you are a junior engineer, make sure you do it sometime. Many/most high-level leaders in tech can tell stories in the $100k to $1m range. I've seen people lose millions of dollars on a project and get promoted immediately after. It is important to understand why that can happen and why it can even be a good thing.

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

#42

Post by lostlogin »

shadowgovt wrote: post #8
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…

The big advantage to software engineering is we deal in abstractions. I liken it to building castles in the clouds; everything down to the foundation is reshapeable. ... the big disadvantage to software engineering is we deal in abstractions. Everything down to the foundation moves. http://thecodelesscode.com/case/154

> I liken it to building castles in the clouds

You’re very positive. When you see a developer dealing with a bug, it seems more like they are dealing with a turd palace floating in a sewer.

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

#44

Post by tialaramex »

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.

Even in human medicine some of the things on the "Do not do" guidance are diagnostic steps which are pointless because you will always do the same thing next regardless.

A bunch of them are for infant minor injury where it's like don't do an X-ray. If you can see a break on the image you'd do A, but if you can't you'd figure the break might be too small to show up and do A anyway. Kids don't need more radiation, just do A immediately without requesting an X-ray.

I have wondered if my cancer diagnosis is at the edge of this case. There's a step where they do a needle biopsy. But, as far as I can tell that biopsy always either says "Cancer" or "Don't know" and I'm not sure what else they'd do for "Not sure" beyond the next step in the cancer diagnosis...

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

#45

Post by Robin_Message »

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.

Three ha you missed out rd problems;concurrency.

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

#46

Post by hathawsh »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #16
shadowgovt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big advantage to software engineering is we deal in abstractions. I liken it to building castles in the clouds; everything down to the foundation is reshapeable. ... the big disadvantage to software engineering is we deal in abstractions. Everything down to the foundation moves. http://thecodelesscode.com/case/154

Also, software is right now primarily a means of codifying human thought, which means it embodies the whole spectrum of human sanity and competence

That deep thought seems especially appropriate for XKCD, yet your username curiously suggests you would disagree.

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

#47

Post by smt88 »

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

It's mostly just a joke about how these roles do their jobs.

But I think it's also partly illuminating the fact that hardware engineers are true engineers, while software engineers mostly aren't.

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

#48

Post by tialaramex »

firefoxd wrote: post #20

I giggled at the end. Just yesterday, we solved an issue that plagued the company for 3 years. For us it was the letter 'A'. Someone had been doing manual fixes inserting and removing data for the past 3 years. It became part of his job. He added a recurring event in his calendar just to do that regular clean up. Millions of customers depended on this one individual making sure they had the correct data plan on their…

So somehow in some parts of the code STATUS_ACTIVE is defined wrong?

I guess there is always a risk that some "helpful" contributor will fix the typo in your definition of HttpHeader::REFERRER as "referer" to make it "referrer" instead, thus completely breaking all the software because nope, that typo is enshrined in the HTTP standard, it's Phillip Hallam-Baker's fault while he was at CERN.

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

#49

Post by lostlogin »

firefoxd wrote: post #20

I giggled at the end. Just yesterday, we solved an issue that plagued the company for 3 years. For us it was the letter 'A'. Someone had been doing manual fixes inserting and removing data for the past 3 years. It became part of his job. He added a recurring event in his calendar just to do that regular clean up. Millions of customers depended on this one individual making sure they had the correct data plan on their…

A tricky one that I’ve seen cause harm is white space or otherwise invisible characters (eg line breaks).

Super frustratingly, Macs populating HL7 fields caused intense pain. It turns out that the character ’ when typed on a Mac keyboard is not compatible with all versions of HL7, or perhaps wasn’t compatible with what the HL7 was passed off to. It’s a distant memory now but it was words like o’clock versus o′clock, or something like that which broke radiology report distribution.

It went on for years before being caught.

Edit: HN is displaying the ’ differently to how it looks when I type it, but it’s still the same character. The fact that we couldn’t see the difference when debugging was half the problem, so this is quite funny.

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

#50

Post by bozhark »

lostlogin wrote: post #39
s1artibartfast wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Was it pulling an F-150?
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