Another favorite bug investigation of you're into this sort of thing: https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/the-discovery-of-apache-zooke...
The weirdest bug I've seen yet
81–90 of 334 posts
Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet
#82> Using open-source Chromium instead of Chrome did not cause crashes, so we couldn’t see what Chrome code was failing either. They don't address why they didn't just run Chromium. Or Firefox. (This is potentially better than the 'solution' they much later ended up with, in which they probably only relieved a symptom of an underlying problem that can exhibit again, and in the meantime is a zero-day exploit waiting to…
> They don't address why they didn't just run Chromium. Or Firefox.
The article implies that Gusto's employees can whatever browser they want.
And, honestly, telling your employees to run a browser that only techies have heard of sounds like a really dumb idea.
Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet
#83Extremely disappointing that they seem to have neither investigated nor enabled others to investigate (e.g. by filing a bug against Chrome). This smells like a potential security vulnerability.
I was hoping for a bit more of a payoff. Like, if the gif was broken, why did the grammarly extension trigger it reliably?
Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet
#84The main reason for tabs to crash is running out of RAM. Never do you see the guy investigating memory usage, which is weird.
If that were the case, I think the bug would be much easier to reproduce; and be a lot more widespread.
Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet
#85> Using open-source Chromium instead of Chrome did not cause crashes, so we couldn’t see what Chrome code was failing either. They don't address why they didn't just run Chromium. Or Firefox. (This is potentially better than the 'solution' they much later ended up with, in which they probably only relieved a symptom of an underlying problem that can exhibit again, and in the meantime is a zero-day exploit waiting to…
> They don't address why they didn't just run Chromium. Or Firefox.
Probably:
1. Because it is reasonable to expect the application to work in Chrome.
2. Chromium isn't intended for production use cases.
Back when IE and Chrome had about equal market share, I worked somewhere that had one team insisting that all employees must use IE for one of their applications, and another team insisting that all employees use Chrome for their application. 50%+ of support calls were employees confusing the two browsers.
Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet
#86Reminds me of the story I read where the guy's car wouldn't start depending on what flavor of ice cream he picked and when investigated he was right. Some kind of evaporation/vacuum leak or something that was dependent on time and some flavors were farther away in the store and took more time to buy.
This one is a legend. I love it, but you can find the debunking on the fact checking sites.
Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet
#87I don't think I would believe myself if I found this being a specific gif. This is a great amount of coincidences in code to cause this.
Grammarly is an application that I don't get. The fact that people are installing, basically spyware, on their computers just to get grammar suggestions to make their writing more boring and add a spellchecker (which is already inside web browsers) is pretty astounding to me. The fact companies allow employees to have it, despite obvious security issues of sending everything one types to a saas, is even more wild.
Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet
#88I have a saying that isn't perfectly true but often will apply to "fixes" like this - If you don't know why the fix worked, you may not have actually fixed it.
Someone once said, there is accidental function, and deliberate function.
If your system doesn't work, and you just plonk around at values, until, very surprisingly, the system starts behaving well and you the call it working... well it might be working now. But it's just accidental correctness. As soon as something causes the system to bank left, something's gonna break and no one knows how to fix it - and you're back to square one.
On the other hand, as hard as it is, if you can clearly tell why your fix will restore function to the system without even applying it, you have deliberate correctness and function. If done right, it is very boring, because exactly and only the expected thing will happen. You should know about the unknowns and plan around those as well, so even if an unknown bites you, it's a known and handled unknown. This can be exhausting to make happen, because it is much harder, but those systems will just work.
But this is a fight I have with some development teams probably forever. "But we poked at the values, and that stopped the flames. It is fixed!" "but why?" "Dunny. But no fire anymore. All good." And then 2 weeks pass, and there is more fire and everyone is like "Oh but why would this happen? How should we have known for this to happen again"
Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet
#89Left me hanging, would not post something like this from my engineering blog. They don't have deeep debugging skills at gusto?
Sounds like they have good time management and prioritisation skills. They found the source of the problem and fixed it.
:( I would've tried to determine the cause of the crash with that specific file in my off time, provided that I could isolate the code in the Grammarly extension in Chrome.
The main reason –other than curiousity– is to ensure that a future regression (in Chrome/Grammarly) wouldn't lead to it again.
Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet
#90Maybe the name was odd `loader-spinner.gif`