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There's a good deal of responsibility in writing code that is going to run over every single page (and PDF document, MS Word doc, the higher ranked Flash animat

by KMag 4y ago

There's a good deal of responsibility in writing code that is going to run over every single page (and PDF document, MS Word doc, the higher ranked Flash animations, etc.) in the visible web. For my part, I once made a bad assumption about how the Google SAX-style parser handled callbacks for zero-length XHTML start-stop tags. I presumed that <title/> would get a callback with the end-of-open-tag and start-of-close-tag pointers being equal, at the character after the close of the tag. Instead, the parser called the callback with the start-of-close-tag pointer after the start-of-close-tag pointer. (I had misinterpreted the API as passing pointers to the start and end of enclosed content.) I had test cases for un-closed <title> tags and <title></title>... but when my code hit production, the few pages (fewer than 1 in a million) that expressed an empty title as <title/> caused my code to try and construct a string with negative length and crashed that portion of the indexing system. I was right to feel very embarrassed for my oversight. I remember the savage meme so clearly because it was quite out of the norm, and I felt bad for the guys since they were so quick to fix things even when not publicly shamed. (Only the author and reviewer got notified when I left a comment on their code review.)

cscurmudgeon 4y ago
Really? Is there any science showing rude reviews improve some metric or some greater good?
- KMag 4y ago
  It wasn't the best way to criticize the code review. If I could go back in time 15 years, it's also not the first mistake I would fix. It stuck in my mind because I felt bad about it. I was frustrated that I had been hounded to drop what I was doing and fix the build because of clear style guide violations that a reviewer let slip. (A couple years later, Google implemented every commit getting a full compilation and run of all tests that code-coverage showed affected the covered code. These days, I wouldn't have been hounded to fix a build break caused by someone else.)
jolux 4y ago
What does it mean that you were right to feel embarrassed? You were wrong to make the mistake, sure, but that happens. That’s what a mistake is. It’s not clear to me what shame helps in this instance. If somebody has a pattern of not meeting a quality bar with their code that’s one thing, but otherwise cutting people up for mistakes really seems like bad culture. Aren’t you supposed to practice blameless postmortems and all that at Google?
- wutbrodo 4y ago
  My recollection from my time there, as well as one of the biggest cultural differences noticeable between my and my workplaces since, is that big chunks of the company really do believe in the blameless postmortem ideal. But culture isn't a magic tool that completely neutralizes assholes, and there are assholes in _every_ organization of sufficient size, like the "[name redacted]" character in the previous post
  - KMag 4y ago
    I probably should have left [redacted]'s name out of it. He's a nice guy, but a bit cynical and rough on the edges, at least he was 15 years ago. He fit in well in New York, brutally honest, but actually generally nice. Edit: I should point out that we were in Google NYC, as were the researchers. We had lunch with them some times. I remember the first name and face of the guy who submitted the slow code, but forget his family name and intentionally left his name out. New Yorker to New Yorker adds a lot of context. Google's corporate culture is generally very Californian, but this happened all within the New York office between people who generally got along pretty well and knew each other decently. In context, there was a heavy note of respect for someone's abilities and disappointment that they weren't performing at a top level. He wouldn't have been so harsh with someone who was new or was a weaker engineer, or someone who wasn't used to New York culture.
    - the-rc 4y ago
      Yeah, that might have made it sound as if he's always like that. To his credit, he was one of those that had to be involved when things got desperate, e.g. the insane and massive data recovery to prevent the index from growing stale during a PCR that wasn't properly planned for (if you were around, you know what I'm talking about).

by KMag 4y ago

cscurmudgeon 4y ago

Really? Is there any science showing rude reviews improve some metric or some greater good?

KMag 4y ago
It wasn't the best way to criticize the code review. If I could go back in time 15 years, it's also not the first mistake I would fix. It stuck in my mind because I felt bad about it. I was frustrated that I had been hounded to drop what I was doing and fix the build because of clear style guide violations that a reviewer let slip. (A couple years later, Google implemented every commit getting a full compilation and run of all tests that code-coverage showed affected the covered code. These days, I wouldn't have been hounded to fix a build break caused by someone else.)

jolux 4y ago

What does it mean that you were right to feel embarrassed? You were wrong to make the mistake, sure, but that happens. That’s what a mistake is. It’s not clear to me what shame helps in this instance. If somebody has a pattern of not meeting a quality bar with their code that’s one thing, but otherwise cutting people up for mistakes really seems like bad culture. Aren’t you supposed to practice blameless postmortems and all that at Google?

wutbrodo 4y ago
My recollection from my time there, as well as one of the biggest cultural differences noticeable between my and my workplaces since, is that big chunks of the company really do believe in the blameless postmortem ideal. But culture isn't a magic tool that completely neutralizes assholes, and there are assholes in _every_ organization of sufficient size, like the "[name redacted]" character in the previous post
- KMag 4y ago
  I probably should have left [redacted]'s name out of it. He's a nice guy, but a bit cynical and rough on the edges, at least he was 15 years ago. He fit in well in New York, brutally honest, but actually generally nice. Edit: I should point out that we were in Google NYC, as were the researchers. We had lunch with them some times. I remember the first name and face of the guy who submitted the slow code, but forget his family name and intentionally left his name out. New Yorker to New Yorker adds a lot of context. Google's corporate culture is generally very Californian, but this happened all within the New York office between people who generally got along pretty well and knew each other decently. In context, there was a heavy note of respect for someone's abilities and disappointment that they weren't performing at a top level. He wouldn't have been so harsh with someone who was new or was a weaker engineer, or someone who wasn't used to New York culture.
  - the-rc 4y ago
    Yeah, that might have made it sound as if he's always like that. To his credit, he was one of those that had to be involved when things got desperate, e.g. the insane and massive data recovery to prevent the index from growing stale during a PCR that wasn't properly planned for (if you were around, you know what I'm talking about).