This is fascinating but I desperately want to know what factors caused the combination of this gif, Google Chrome (but not Chromium), and having the Grammarly desktop app installed to crash the...
This is fascinating but I desperately want to know what factors caused the combination of this gif, Google Chrome (but not Chromium), and having the Grammarly desktop app installed to crash the page. I totally understand why they can't know this themselves but it's going to haunt me.
This was an interesting, but ultimately unfulfilling, article since we never learn what the root cause is. This is unfortunately very common in software: something’s wrong? Just change stuff until...
This was an interesting, but ultimately unfulfilling, article since we never learn what the root cause is. This is unfortunately very common in software: something’s wrong? Just change stuff until it works. Not all the blame lands on devs here. There often not enough resources or time to do full analyses on every problem. And management often doesn’t care once things are working, no matter how tenuously. But what occurs over time is a massive amount of minute tech debt that makes long-term maintenance challenging. Perhaps it is my ignorance, but I don’t think we’d ever build a bridge in the same way.
To be fair, this article clearly shows they did go through all the steps available to them and actually got pretty close to the core of the issue. Well, I believe we actually sort of do. A bridge...
To be fair, this article clearly shows they did go through all the steps available to them and actually got pretty close to the core of the issue.
Perhaps it is my ignorance, but I don’t think we’d ever build a bridge in the same way.
Well, I believe we actually sort of do. A bridge is being designed, then the design is put through all sorts of calculations and simulations for load bearing and other factors. If things fail outside defined margins the design is adjusted until it no longer fails.
Of course this is all done before the bridge is being build. But even during construction of many projects adjustments are being made based on issues they run into. And even then there are plenty of examples of adjustments being made to bridges and other buildings due to unforeseen real world conditions. A fairly recent example would be the London Millenium bridge
As far as software development goes. It also highly depends on the industry and application how rigorous the process is of validating things beforehand.
I wasn’t trying to be overly critical of the author in particular, but this paragraph particularly resonated with me: Ultimately, they could have done nothing and the problem would have gone away...
I wasn’t trying to be overly critical of the author in particular, but this paragraph particularly resonated with me:
Why did this particular gif crash Chrome when Grammarly was installed? Unfortunately, with access to neither the Chrome source code nor the Grammarly source code, we can only guess. In the time since we replaced the gif, either Grammarly or Chrome or both have fixed this issue, because the original gif no longer causes Chrome to crash.
Ultimately, they could have done nothing and the problem would have gone away on its own anyway.
Now, to be clear, I’m a SW manager and I have absolutely told my team: “I’m glad it’s working but we don’t have time to do a root cause analysis, we need to move on to the next thing.” It’s the nature of the industry.
I’m not too familiar with things like healthcare; perhaps things are done more rigorously there. Even if they are, their software is still going to build off a myriad of packages that aren’t.
I realize this wasn’t really the point of the article but it did just so happen to strike at a frustration I’ve had.
I'll quote my favorite quote from @wervenyt when discussing healthcare: We've come a long way using that process, but it isn't really any more sophisticated than any processes done in other STEM...
I’m not too familiar with things like healthcare; perhaps things are done more rigorously there
I'll quote my favorite quote from @wervenyt when discussing healthcare:
the truth is that since 99% of medicine is "did you die? did us poking you that way make you more likely to die? no? hell yeah, mission accomplished"
We've come a long way using that process, but it isn't really any more sophisticated than any processes done in other STEM fields. Medical practitioners do keep better notes from what I've noticed though.
Here's a quick read from the Gusto engineering team about a doozy of a bug they discovered in their internal tooling which was causing crashes in Google Chrome. I always enjoy reading these types...
Here's a quick read from the Gusto engineering team about a doozy of a bug they discovered in their internal tooling which was causing crashes in Google Chrome. I always enjoy reading these types of write-ups because the answer is usually something silly like it was in this case.
This is fascinating but I desperately want to know what factors caused the combination of this gif, Google Chrome (but not Chromium), and having the Grammarly desktop app installed to crash the page. I totally understand why they can't know this themselves but it's going to haunt me.
This was an interesting, but ultimately unfulfilling, article since we never learn what the root cause is. This is unfortunately very common in software: something’s wrong? Just change stuff until it works. Not all the blame lands on devs here. There often not enough resources or time to do full analyses on every problem. And management often doesn’t care once things are working, no matter how tenuously. But what occurs over time is a massive amount of minute tech debt that makes long-term maintenance challenging. Perhaps it is my ignorance, but I don’t think we’d ever build a bridge in the same way.
To be fair, this article clearly shows they did go through all the steps available to them and actually got pretty close to the core of the issue.
Well, I believe we actually sort of do. A bridge is being designed, then the design is put through all sorts of calculations and simulations for load bearing and other factors. If things fail outside defined margins the design is adjusted until it no longer fails.
Of course this is all done before the bridge is being build. But even during construction of many projects adjustments are being made based on issues they run into. And even then there are plenty of examples of adjustments being made to bridges and other buildings due to unforeseen real world conditions. A fairly recent example would be the London Millenium bridge
As far as software development goes. It also highly depends on the industry and application how rigorous the process is of validating things beforehand.
I wasn’t trying to be overly critical of the author in particular, but this paragraph particularly resonated with me:
Ultimately, they could have done nothing and the problem would have gone away on its own anyway.
Now, to be clear, I’m a SW manager and I have absolutely told my team: “I’m glad it’s working but we don’t have time to do a root cause analysis, we need to move on to the next thing.” It’s the nature of the industry.
I’m not too familiar with things like healthcare; perhaps things are done more rigorously there. Even if they are, their software is still going to build off a myriad of packages that aren’t.
I realize this wasn’t really the point of the article but it did just so happen to strike at a frustration I’ve had.
I'll quote my favorite quote from @wervenyt when discussing healthcare:
We've come a long way using that process, but it isn't really any more sophisticated than any processes done in other STEM fields. Medical practitioners do keep better notes from what I've noticed though.
Here's a quick read from the Gusto engineering team about a doozy of a bug they discovered in their internal tooling which was causing crashes in Google Chrome. I always enjoy reading these types of write-ups because the answer is usually something silly like it was in this case.