Thursday, November 1, 2012

Bugs in Production

The amount that a bug hitting production annoys me turns out to be proportional to log(affected_users / time) * stupidity_of(bug).  If nobody can use the core functionality of the app because of something that would have failed a perl -c check, that yields a lot more angst than "some non-critical task doesn't work for one (uniquely configured) client when the day of the month is 29 or more," even though the latter is often more difficult to diagnose.

Yeah.  I crashed our site the other day over a trivial logging change, intended to gather debugging information for a rare condition of the latter sort.  It was so trivial it couldn't possibly go wrong, meaning stupidity_of(bug) was quite large.

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