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> Engineers who don't mind reading and are able to read attentively One very direct application of this skill in day to day engineering is just reading and cor
by davnicwil 4y ago
> Engineers who don't mind reading and are able to read attentively
One very direct application of this skill in day to day engineering is just reading and correctly interpreting error logs and stacktraces.
It's pretty incredible how often that's just the cause of a bug being literally given verbatim, if one can only engage with the message on its terms and frame of reference, and parse out the info from it that's meaningful in the context of the software you're writing (and not, for instance, expecting the error message to somehow do that work for you, which is often impossible).
- recfab 4y agoIt's surprising how many developers won't even bother to read an error message. At my list gig there were a few folks who would regularly message me anytime there was a failure in their CI pipeline. No reading the message. Possibly not even opening the failed job at all. Most of the time, the pipeline was doing what it was supposed to: failing a bad build. It didn't even occur to them that it was their code that was the problem. Just "the pipeline is red: send to @recfab".
- sophiabits 4y agoI recently paired with someone who was running into issues configuring some settings in the Facebook developers console. I got them to demo the issue for me, and they /immediately/ closed out of the error dialog when it popped up. Maddening!
- pixelfarmer 4y ago> expecting the error message to somehow do that work for you, which is often impossible But that is in part also because many error messages are closer to "there was an error" than providing full context info. These few minutes more invested into proper error messages can save many many man hours down the line.