5 ms·
Year's ago i was coding a warehouse management system and in this edge case, that required a moon full and blood sacrifice to even have it occur i stuck some de
by Omnius 9y ago
Year's ago i was coding a warehouse management system and in this edge case, that required a moon full and blood sacrifice to even have it occur i stuck some debug code/message that was only ever meant for me to try and figure out how it was happening.
5 years later i get a call. "We have a weird error message it says ... How did i even get here! This error is bad and you should feel bad."
- bdamm 9y agoAs a used-to-be engineering manager for a group of engineers who didn't appreciate how often these "blood sacrifice" errors actually do occur in production, I fully appreciate the kind of "oops" feeling that comes when realizing that your obscure errors messages made it into production. Even something simple like "This has all gone terribly wrong. Call engineering." can make its way to the console of some "customer service" technician talking on the phone with an irate muggle working three companies away, and the error message triggered escalations at all three companies... you start to appreciate that maybe you should take your job seriously, and not make so many assumptions about who is using your software.
- HarryHirsch 9y agoMy undergraduate advisor would say that each new user uncovers a new class of bugs.
- kochthesecond 9y agoWell, most product managers I've dealt with barely wants to think about error cases and error handing. They mostly care about getting the current feature out, and don't care much for the graceful handling of every possible scenario under the moon.
- nulagrithom 9y agoAh, but there's something to be said for the effectiveness of these weird error messages. Typically the conversation would go: "We got an error come fix it", with no further details. It can be really hard to track down from there. I experienced something similar when troubleshooting some Chrome issues across a Citrix XenApp farm. It was so incredibly useful to be able to ask the users "Did you get a dinosaur or a He's Dead Jim?" One was a connection issue I could disregard, the other was the memory management problem I was trying to track down. Sometimes I wonder if we should make all our cryptic, developer-only errors absurd and memorable. I've never had a user tell me anything like "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space error". "The lemur jumped the shark again" gets their attention.
- ConceptJunkie 9y agoA unique error code would accomplish the same thing, but I get your point. This happens to me all the time with the software project I work on, which is enormous and has been around for a long, long time: the error messages usually aren't very useful. Neither is the log. In fact, the log is often little more than all the debug messages created during development.
- nulagrithom 9y agoA unique error code will accomplish little. It will serve mostly to bewilder and frustrate you after discovering many users can't (or won't) remember so much as two numbers. What I'm saying is take the unique error code and add an absurd/funny phrase to the number. It's easier for people to remember an odd mental image than it is ERROR CODE -42.
- anitil 9y agoI could see a use for an error code generator that would come up with memorable nonsense sentences sort of like imgur's urls. "Error : Green Exemplary Huemul" rather than "Error : -42"
- cjsawyer 9y agoI’m a big fan of calling non-software people muggles :)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]