Wil Shipley Is Awesome
Wil Shipley, programmer of awesomeness like Delicious Library had a recent post about a truly impressive crasher and data loss bug. The article is worth it in and of itself, however, the real beauty of this article is in his opinion of computer science PhD students.
These are, in my opinion, probably from computer science PhD students who believe in a perfect world of provable programming and the Easter Bunny. Here in the realm of actually making money, if running your program causes a user’s computer to crash, she doesn’t care if it’s Apple’s “fault” — she’s going to post all over the interwebs that your program sucks, and ask you for her money back. Now, since you’re not a PhD student, you like money, so this is bad.
This is SO TRUE. This is everything that was wrong with grad school wrapped up into one nice little nugget.
Also, the article has a pretty good analysis of how to diagnose and treat software bugs. Triage, backup, reproduce, before even looking at code. (Admittedly I normally reproduce in unit tests, but that is generally before looking at the suspect code.)
July 8th, 2008 at 11:16
Since I am in Bug Purgatory this week, this will be nice reading over lunchtime!
July 8th, 2008 at 11:16
Good story! I’m not sure about the Jessica Alba interlude, but I like parts where he was mulling over the situation while hacking & slashing. Well told.