Tag: bug

Agent First Name

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

I got a promotional mail from Facebook by Agent First Name. I wonder if that’s a bad parenting decision, an engineering joke, or a bug.

I think it was just a glitch in The Matrix.

Agent First Name is not to be confused with his older sibling, Agent Full Name.

Varan

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

One of the good things about buying a new item, like my new headphones, is that I now get targeted ads with music, headphones, and other pleasantries. This is how I discovered the city of Varan, Bulgaria 🙂

The Single Cockroach Rule

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

Seeing one cockroach under the sink usually means an infestation. Roaches like to hide. It only showed up because the hiding spots were overcrowded.

I like to apply this generalization to software engineering—especially over beer.

  • If you receive a single bug report about a feature you just launched, it likely means the feature is completely broken. Users tend to work around UX issues and only reach out to support when things are really bad and they have no other options.
  • That one security, usability, or other issue you noticed in a pull request? If there’s one in the PR, there are probably more in the adjacent code.
  • A missing space in a code change? That usually means there’s no linting in place.
  • A missed edge case? It might indicate something is off in our testing process.

The way I defined this Cocroach Rule matches the definition of a Hasty Generalization. After all, one cockroach—or one bug—is a sample size of one. There’s always a chance that a reported issue is an extreme outlier, something no one else will ever encounter. Maybe a high-energy particle hit a chip somewhere. It happens.

But my long-term experience shows that the Single Cockroach Problem largely holds true. It applies in many areas where the difference between zero and one is significant.

Restoring a lost blogging streak

~ Veselin ~ 15 Comments

Last week I somehow saved a post instead of publishing it and my 4-month blogging streak ended. A couple of days later, I published the missing post with a date from the past, and the blogging streak resumed a day later. This sounds more like a bug than a feature but it worked for me.