Twitter @Nick_Craver: “I’ve talked with so, so many new devs over the years and far too many are afraid to try because they’re afraid to fail. So do me a favor, share your failures […]”
Posted by jpluimers on 2021/02/04
Every now and then it is good to read back this [WayBack] thread by @Nick_Craver: “
The thing about mistakes is that they do happen, and we need to learn from them. Almost always, it is useless to blame, but do your best to prevent them from happening again by doing blameless post-mortem.
We do however need to become better engineers, so this thread is relevant as well, because the impact of some is not been a net good:
[Cached] WayBack: thread by @www_ora_tion_ca: “This is wildly disingenuous, I speak as a flight instructor and major IT incident investigator. Modern software authors have the professional discipline of a cute puppy in comparison to aviation practitioners. […]”. quoting [WayBack] Alex Stamos on Twitter: “I agree with Chris. This is the kind of thinking that leads to “Why can’t we just have building codes for software? It worked to protect against earthquakes and fire!” Earthquakes and fire aren’t conscious adversaries. Try writing a standards document on how to win at chess.”
My biggest faults:
- [WayBack] Jeroen Pluimers on Twitter: “In development, the worst was deploying a tool that used OLE Variants. Mandate was to develop everything on Dutch systems, having a decimal comma, just like production. An external user had US-English with a decimal period. Insurance contracts were a factor 100 off shortly.”
- [WayBack] Jeroen Pluimers on Twitter: “In OPS, the worst was recursively deleting a directory on Novell NetWare 3.x. The root directory. As SUPERVISOR user. On the production server. The key users furiously walked in (the CEO not: he had no computer). My luck was the NetWare SALVAGE utility. “
Starting points:
- [WayBack] Nick Craver on Twitter: “I’ve talked with so, so many new devs over the years and far too many are afraid to try because they’re afraid to fail. So do me a favor, share your failures. Not just the successes. It’s not just about learning from them. Sometimes it’s just about people knowing they happen.”
- [WayBack] Rob Russell on Twitter: “This is wildly disingenuous, I speak as a flight instructor and major IT incident investigator. Modern software authors have the professional discipline of a cute puppy in comparison to aviation practitioners.”
- [WayBack] Alex Stamos on Twitter: “I agree with Chris. This is the kind of thinking that leads to “Why can’t we just have building codes for software? It worked to protect against earthquakes and fire!” Earthquakes and fire aren’t conscious adversaries. Try writing a standards document on how to win at chess.”
https://twitter.com/www_ora_tion_ca/status/1027539289750429696?lang=en
https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1027298006972821504
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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