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Someone once stated that every observable behaviour will be depended upon by someone sooner or later. I can only imagine someone going to great lengths to avoi
by ablob 4y ago
Someone once stated that every observable behaviour will be depended upon by someone sooner or later.
I can only imagine someone going to great lengths to avoid such "a stable order of operations was never guaranteed" discussion by just randomizing the order of execution or something similar (I bet someone will then use that as a seed for prng).
edit: skipping the first paragraph lead to repeating hyrums law.
- avgcorrection 4y ago> Someone once stated that every observable behaviour will be depended upon by someone sooner or later. ......... Hyrum’s law?
- Macha 4y agoI once got a bug report from a user's manager about the values in our application's private database. It was an internal user interface, intended for employees of our conpany. Once upon a time, we had a process for adding a new record where it had to be added manually to multiple internal systems. So the internal UI had its own copy of the data. But then we built a single source of truth for this data source, that single source of truth had an API which our application would query and so the database table updates were abandoned as they were for the database's internal use only, however nobody ever bothered to remove the old table with a few hundred rows of stale data. Two years later, we got the bug report then. The users' manager was complaining that the dataset was incomplete, that it was impeding his work, and that it needed to be fixed asap. It turned out at some stage he had requested and was granted read only access to that DB, and had been querying the records of user actions in that DB to track the volume and quality of work his subordinates did. And then at some other point he realised that he could join against this table to get readable labels rather than opaque identifiers for the types of data said reports were working on. Except of course, the data was two years stale so he was noticing an increasing amount of "missing" labels in his report. Said user escalated all the way to a VP of engineering before accepting that no, a private database is not a supported interface of our product.
- infogulch 4y agoI hope you at least estimated how much work it would be to add a user-facing audit tracking and reporting feature. You could probably charge good money for that.
- Macha 4y agoConsidering this was an in-house tool for a very company specific task which had 3 managers that could possibly use that information, it just was never going to be a high priority.
- ilyt 4y ago"Users will eventually use your database directly no matter how good your UI/API is" deserves law on its own tbh. Or maybe "the shittier your API/UI is the higher chance that users will just use database directly.
- deafpolygon 4y agoWhen I had to do user management on a multi-site Wordpress instance years ago, I had to resort to using the database to manage user groups. It was a wild time.
- CuriousCosmic 4y ago> I can only imagine someone going to great lengths to avoid such "a stable order of operations was never guaranteed" discussion by just randomizing the order of execution or something similar (I bet someone will then use that as a seed for prng). Bingo. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34631275#34636529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34631275#34636529