@daves.software
19:55 When I worked at the NAIC we had an application that at one point started failing in production. It would fail 9 times, then succeed, then fail 9 times and then succeed. I traced it back to a dynamic SQL query where the code was interpolating an ID value into the SQL string and we had reached the point where the IDs were large enough to trigger a conversion to scientific notation. Unfortunately, in the conversion to scientific notation, one digit of precision was dropped, so if the last digit was non-zero, the query would fail. If the last digit happened to be zero, it would succeed. Good times...
@DontThinkSo11
Regarding your semver story: defaults ARE part of the interface. If you change defaults, you're changing how someone has to call your function in order to get the same behavior. That's the definition of an interface change.
@ISKLEMMI
"The interface didn't change." This is only true for the most naïve understanding of what interfaces are. They encompass more than just function signatures. That bit about gnu parallel was dope! Thanks for sharing!
@T1Oracle
I met an engineer like this. They promoted him to principal engineer. He doesn't write code, he just rejects everyone else's code and gets a nice bonus for it. Obfuscating requirements just makes all of that easier.
@k98killer
“I used to say that when being CEO at Apple wasn’t fun anymore, I’d quit. But now I’ve changed my mind — when being CEO isn’t fun anymore, I’ll just fire people until it is fun again.” -- Michael Scott, CEO of Apple, regarding the massive layoffs undertaken to solve the bozo explosion, a few months before he got fired for it
@darioabbece3948
You could do this: -have a case-insensitive language - define NULL - define null Sometimes it will get corrected, sometimes it won't Of course they should have different usages but vastly overlapping
@mattius17
The closest thing I've seen to the perfect bug was in a geometric unit test with bad randomisation. It almost never failed when running tests locally, but in the CI pipeline it seemed to almost always fail on master (never on a branch). The fun thing was that rather than generating 10k random polygons, it would generate the same random polygon 10k times 😅 so you had to be really (un)lucky to reproduce it
@therealestsnake
That test one was soul crushing. I had a coworker who wrote some absolutely horrible test code, so that when I fixed an issue, the entire test file broke and complained. I had to completely rip out the mocking and re-do the file. Great fun!
@christsciple
Dude I once had a job that had me work across a dozen different departments, each with their own rituals, scrum masters, traditions, and software. Every day I had to deal with a hodgepodge of different jira boards and weird other facilitation dependencies that I never care enough to learn the names to. I spent 3/4 of my time simply in pointless meetings, "social times", and trying to update my tasks across everything rather than actually developing and architecting software. Quit after 6 months. Had me wanting to go back to VBA development
@attilasedon9593
The 4:55-5:23 part. Man I have this right now. We got a "manager" who wants to make the most elegant software and behaves like an architect (I have not seen him write a piece of code). He goes around to everyone touting his ideas and every interaction goes like this: "I don't want to tell you how to do this, but I want to understand and ..." then proceeds to criticize you . And when we have a technical discussion he just pulls everyone into technical vortex of ideas that does not go anywhere, it's tiring to have any technical meetings with him. And my biggest issue is he knows a few things well, and in other things like Frontend/Infra (originally backend developer) he just goes full Dunning–Kruger effect. It's really toxic and he pushes us for to reach unnecessary deadlines (like for a meeting that had little to no importance). And we have already rewritten the backend because of him, next it's gonna be the Frontend or the Infra. :D I am sad because my team is great, I am on a greenfield where we experiment, and figure a lot of things as we go and it's really fun it's just we have "Him".
@shadamethyst1258
Speaking of the true magic bug, I had that at work. Sometimes builds would fail because they included invalid code, but when running the build again it would work. After weeks of having that bug pop up here and there, I finally found out that the Console Ninja extension was modifying files in the node_modules, and those files got compiled into the dev build as-is, breaking the build. So if you want fun bugs, have a tool that subtly modifies the output binaries, and introduce fragility there. Now your engineers can't treat the compiler as a pure function, and will go crazy.
@KayOScode
I fully agree with your take on threading. I did this a while back on a brute force keyboard layout optimizer. I wrote incredibly optimized code for one thread, but I allowed the isolation of state resources in such a way I can just run it on however many threads I want without an issue. I got insane performance doing that
@lucaslopes1260
Take the logarithm of a random number between 0 and 1, and say it is negative. Every number in this interval has a negative log. But sometimes you'll get a number so close to zero, its log will be a huge negative number, causing an overflow.
@aredrih6723
On the subject of weird c causing random crash,there was the underhanded c contest. The last entry winner used a dirty typedef tp change the type of the pointer of a function: if you compile the unit of code, it takes f32*; if you include the file it takes f16* (or the otherway around ) The compiler doesn't se a problem. The linker doesn't care. And you got a really weird edge case were the program errors out
@karmatraining
Can we talk about how this is literally also a playbook for extremely high job security for chaotic neutral types
@acasualviewer5861
The original research by Tom Demarco that referred to some engineers being 10x more productive than others had more to do with environment than skill, computer language or years of experience. The book "Peopleware" describes this. And it recommends people having private, quiet offices. The current trend of putting a bunch of people in the same room, and hiring for super engineers, is opposite to what the research was proposing. This common misconception is similar to the one that made governments standardize on the waterfall model, whose original paper mentioned it as how to NOT develop software.
@jacknguyen5220
Side note about the side note about the GNU Parallel, I definitely agree. What you're really thinking of is coroutines and asynchronous programming. Essentially every part of the program only needs to be concerned with itself and its connections. Then a separate "manager" controls everything. You don't have to try to control "this thread needs to be spawned" or "this process needs to do this now" or whatever, everything just works and it's the greatest.
@DeathBean89
I'm a data scientist. I was working in R on an old project, and learned that you could redefine the addition operator globally for the interpreter's session. Naturally, I redefined it to randomly add one to the result every now and then. You could fix it by restarting the interpreter session, but if you managed to sneak it into a script that got imported somewhere... :)
@vytah
The fear of experiencing that semver story is why we never bump dependencies without testing. Dependencies are pinned to exact versions, periodically updated in a batch, ran through integration tests, and then allowed to mature on test servers till the next release. We don't rush the process unless there's a CVE affecting our codebase.
@farqueueman