5 ms·
Damn, seems like a good way to have a ton of buggy code in production.
by RankingMember 6y ago
Damn, seems like a good way to have a ton of buggy code in production.
- lkbm 6y agoI'm guessing most people are familiar, but if you're interested in this, look up "Knight Capital flash crash". They lost $440MM in about 45 minutes. As I recall, they reused an old feature flag accidentally reviving some old code.
- bywaterstreet 6y agoThanks for the ref. I'll bring this up the next time somebody questions my "let's clean up these flags in prod".
- Tade0 6y agoOh yeah. But the traders had just one KPI - money made.
- dudul 6y agoWhen you do HFT, nobody cares about that. The only thing that matters is to make money. I also worked on HFT software written in Java (not the one in this article), and the mindset was completely different from other industries. F QA, F unit tests, F your F-ing AbstractProxySingletonFactory, just write the code that makes it work, see you after lunch to deploy. Yes, in a lot of ways it is awful, but OTOH it is really great intense bootcamp to learn how to write very modular, easy to change and to read code. No time to over engineer, no time to build these fancy generic abstractions to support the one use case you have and the dozen hypothetical use cases product never asked for.