Right, it may have just changed the state of the system to mask the problem, or it may have just swept it under the rug.
Right, it may have just changed the state of the system to mask the problem, or it may have just swept it under the rug. But you also may have just avoided a complex, long debugging session which would not result in reusable knowledge. Debugging something that ultimately ends up being a 24-hour one-time glitch in AWS is a waste of time unless you learn something useful in the process or have sufficient reason to believe you altered the speed with which it was fixed, no matter how fun the journey. Sure, if it results in you deciding you need to be resilient under AWS failures more, that's great. But often times you just burned man hours and lost the opportunity to work on something else. I don't think it's reasonable to say that all debugging results in useful learning. (I'd probably argue the contrary, given the number of times I end up grokking incidental implementation details of some third party software or system during debugging that in just a few short months later becomes useless as that code or service is paved over.) Trying to tilt the odds in your favor so you make educated guesses around when this will be the case is part of the skill. Part of this skill is also being able to recognize when a bug you thought had been routed around was simply swept under the rug, and changing course to understand it properly instead of sweeping it under the rug again. ("Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice... you can't get fooled again.") I find these are the exception not the rule, and are probably worth the cost. The joys of shipping outweigh the joys of understanding every facet of a misbehaving system, at least for me.
Posted by gfodor on Nov 10, 2014, 4:10 AM
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IMO it's a bit more nuanced than what the author portrays it as.
In the UK Amazon have now raised the price of general shipping to be 2/3 the price of a months prime subscription.
Credit where credit is due, critics claiming "[Apple device] is too expensive for something that just does [basic function]" have been pr...
I like to buy music.
Meet K-Claw.
Fable is way too expensive for basic software stuff.
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Right, it may have just changed the state of the system to mask the problem, or it may have just swept it under the rug.
Right, it may have just changed the state of the system to mask the problem, or it may have just swept it under the rug. But you also may have just avoided a complex, long debugging session which would not result in reusable knowledge. Debugging something that ultimately ends up being a 24-hour one-time glitch in AWS is a waste of time unless you learn something useful in the process or have sufficient reason to believe you altered the speed with which it was fixed, no matter how fun the journey. Sure, if it results in you deciding you need to be resilient under AWS failures more, that's great. But often times you just burned man hours and lost the opportunity to work on something else. I don't think it's reasonable to say that all debugging results in useful learning. (I'd probably argue the contrary, given the number of times I end up grokking incidental implementation details of some third party software or system during debugging that in just a few short months later becomes useless as that code or service is paved over.) Trying to tilt the odds in your favor so you make educated guesses around when this will be the case is part of the skill. Part of this skill is also being able to recognize when a bug you thought had been routed around was simply swept under the rug, and changing course to understand it properly instead of sweeping it under the rug again. ("Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice... you can't get fooled again.") I find these are the exception not the rule, and are probably worth the cost. The joys of shipping outweigh the joys of understanding every facet of a misbehaving system, at least for me.
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