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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

#81

Post by verve_rat »

lilyball wrote: post #72
ascar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's because it matches the way we speak dates aloud. When intended for human consumption, sortability and big-endianness doesn't matter, but matching the way we speak does. Maybe other cultures actually speak dates differently, I don't know, but I have never seen a native English speaker habitually speak dates any differently than "January 1st, 2001". All that said, I definitely agree with the original complaint, m-…

I'm from NZ and it is 100% normal to switch back and forth between "The second of March" and "March the 23rd".

People I have met from Australia, South Africa, the UK, all have the same flexibility.

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#82

Post by [deleted] »

lilyball wrote: post #72
ascar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's because it matches the way we speak dates aloud. When intended for human consumption, sortability and big-endianness doesn't matter, but matching the way we speak does. Maybe other cultures actually speak dates differently, I don't know, but I have never seen a native English speaker habitually speak dates any differently than "January 1st, 2001". All that said, I definitely agree with the original complaint, m-…

[deleted]

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#83

Post by theamk »

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…

We do say "five dollars" while writing "$5", so saying and writing different things is not unheard of.

And endiannes / sorting comes up in real life pretty often - scanning for large numbers in the price list, or finding stuff in the sorts list.

I think if history turned differently, we could have had sane time format in the US.

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#84

Post by verve_rat »

bamboozled wrote: post #53
missedthecue wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, there is literally no way to confuse it with another date, unless you go back 100 years, when Slack didn't exist. There is no 22nd month, so we know the 22s are the day and the year, leaving only the 2 to be the month. Is it really that difficult to parse?

So we could either: a) Use a far superior date format which nearly the entire world uses by default and is better and simpler in many ways. b) Do logic when we see dates to try workout what format the date is in. Going with a seems like a no brainer...

Especially in this scenario where you are communicating to an international audience.

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#85

Post by samstave »

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?

OMG - I thought I clicked on the tablet thread regarding Sumerian OOOs -- and I thought you were sarcastically making fun of the way the Sumerians captured dates on limestone tablets ~4,000 years ago...

(i had scrolled immediately down, so the thread titel wasnt visible when I was reading your comment)

haha

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#86

Post by jc_811 »

lilyball wrote: post #72
ascar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's because it matches the way we speak dates aloud. When intended for human consumption, sortability and big-endianness doesn't matter, but matching the way we speak does. Maybe other cultures actually speak dates differently, I don't know, but I have never seen a native English speaker habitually speak dates any differently than "January 1st, 2001". All that said, I definitely agree with the original complaint, m-…

Oh this is a great point! I'd never realized that. I know that in Spanish (and I assume many of the romance languages) we always say the day first, eg dos de febrero (2nd of February). In American English even though the day first technically is grammatically correct, we pretty much never say it in that order (February 2nd instead of the 2nd of February)

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#87

Post by erichurkman »

qubyte wrote: post #41
true_religion wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you meant Broker, but the misspelling is an act of genius since we are talking about downtime caused by an infrastructure failure.

And I misread it as McBorker and now I can't stop chuckling.

McBorker, Chaos Monkey's cousin.

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#88

Post by bognition »

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.

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#89

Post by rcthompson »

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?

The point is to describe the date using only the number 2.

Re: Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22

#90

Post by lucideer »

charcircuit wrote: post #33
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?

It's a shortened version of "February 22, 2022" It doesn't seem that bad to turn it into 2-22-22.

It's also a shortened version of "22nd of February, 2022".
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