Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Muphry's law.



I'm contemptuous of his coding practice, not his writing or grammar. His writing is pleasant to read... but so what? where are the multiple layers of defense standing between a simple syntactical or semantic error and a full scale business-impacting technical fuck up. that is what I meant by being vigilant and paranoid.


I'd be offended if it wasn't for the fact that your original accusation appears to be that I had had a happy childhood. I'll take that one on the chin.

As for the rest... well, I don't understand where you're going with it. Pop psychology aside, are you really suggesting that you write utterly seamless code every single time? You've never done a build and then realised that you made an error somewhere along the way, gone back and fixed it? You act as if my mistake had the potential to ruin a business. Of course it didn't- I picked up on it before the code had even been pushed to the remote repository.

You can live in a world where everyone does everything perfectly, every time (and pay the price when you inevitably don't) or you can set up systems with unit testing, user testing, and- yes- developer testing that results in bugs being dealt with in a timely manner before a single end-user sees anything.

But hey, each to their own. Whatever works for you. If you get it right first time, every time, then you are a better programmer than I, and I congratulate you on it.


>>You act as if my mistake had the potential to ruin a business. Of course it didn't- I picked up on it before the code had even been pushed to the remote repository.

Not to beat on you, but didn't you discover the error after users started using it in a big news day?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: