Your Code Assumes Every UUID Is Random
For years a UUID meant version 4. One hundred and twenty two random bits, and a few fixed ones saying what kind it was. So code grew up around that…
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You Have Been Staring at the Stack Trace and Forgot to Blink
It is four in the afternoon. The bug is close. You have been reading the same stack trace for forty minutes. Your eyes feel gritty. The lines start…
A Customer Asked Your Assistant for Its Instructions and It Read Them Out
The support assistant had a long system prompt. Be polite. Stay on topic. Never mention competitors. And near the bottom, a paragraph for the hard c…
Your XML Parser Opened a File Because the Document Asked It To
The feature was an import. Suppliers upload a product feed as XML, and the screen shows a preview. Name. Price. Description. A tester sent a feed wi…
One Null in the Subquery and Your NOT IN Returned Nothing
Marketing wanted a list. Every customer who had never placed an order. The query was short and read like English. Select from customers where id is…
Your IDs Were Equal Until They Passed 127
The check was one line. If the customer on the order is the customer on the session, let them see it. Two Long values, compared with a double equals…
Your On Call Week Is Not a Normal Week With Pages in It
The sprint plan has your name against the migration. It is also your week holding the pager. Everybody agreed to this without noticing, because the…
Your Best Day Is Not Your Baseline
There was a Tuesday two years ago when everything worked. You understood the problem by half past nine. The design fell out of it. The tests went gr…
Your Build Time Is Choosing What You Think About
Time the loop you are really in. Save the file. Run the thing. Find out whether you were right. For a great many people that round trip is a little…
The Model Cannot Miss What It Never Received
You pasted the file and asked why the totals are wrong. The answer came back confident and slightly beside the point. You went round three times, sh…
An Answer Is Free to Be Wrong, an Action Is Not
For two years the worst thing it could do was tell you something untrue. You read it, you doubted it, you checked. A wrong answer cost you a minute…
Your Code Cannot Tell Blank From Unanswered
The report said forty percent of customers had opted out of marketing. Forty percent had not opted out. Forty percent had never been asked, because…
You Read Your Code and Installed Everybody Else's
You reviewed every line of that feature. Two of you read it. Then somebody typed install, and four hundred packages nobody has ever read joined the…
Zero Failures and Zero Tests Look the Same
The build is green. It has been green all week. That is the part you should have found suspicious. Somebody renamed a directory in a tidy-up commit…
The Meter Is Running on Every Request
The demo cost four pence. You ran it thirty times while building it, glanced at the total, and stopped thinking about it, because four pence is not…
Two Sources of Truth Will Always Disagree
Somewhere in your system the same fact is stored twice. A count in a column and the rows it is counting. A status on the order and a status on the p…