Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

This is the latest in a string of incidents where critical software systems, facing new pressure due to the pandemic, are catastrophically failing their users. I think what's happened in the past is that most public-facing software systems either a) were not really critical (because people had the alternative of doing things in-person), or b) (as in the case of all the ancient COBOL systems underpinning the US gov) had been made reliable over the years through sheer brute force as opposed to principled engineering. But in the latter case, as we saw with New Jersey's unemployment system, that "reliability" was fragile and contingent on the current state of affairs, and had no hope of withstanding a sudden shift in usage patterns.

Now we have various organizations - governmental and otherwise - hastily setting up online versions of essential services and it seems like every single one of them breaks on arrival.

We need some sort of standard for software engineering quality. I don't think this is an academic question anymore. Real people's lives are being impacted every day now by shoddy software, and with the current crisis they often have no alternative. Software that you or I could probably have executed better, but that the people who were hired to do it either a) couldn't, or b) didn't bother. It's nearly impossible for non-technical decision makers in these orgs to evaluate the quality of the systems they've hired people to build. We need quality assurance at an institutional level.

If not governmental, maybe an organization around this could be made by developers themselves. Not the "certified for $technology" certifications we have now, but a certification of fundamental software engineering skills and principles. A certification you can lose if you do something colossally irresponsible. At the end of the day, this dilution of quality is having a negative impact on our job field, so it concerns all of us. It leads to technical debt, micro-management, excessively rigid deadlines and requirements, which we all have to deal with. All of these are either symptoms of or coping mechanisms for management's inability to evaluate engineering quality.

We keep making a bunch of products where protocols and existing software would do just fine, while hitting fewer edge cases.

Know what would be better than the ten goddamn apps and the iPad and shit they're using for our kid's school? Mailed (or emailed) worksheet packets with guidance, recorded lessons on Youtube. Mail back the worksheets, have the food-delivering schoolbuses pick them up, drop them off at the school every week or so, or just do photos-to-PDF on a phone and email them. Or they could just give each kid workbooks and textbooks like they did when I was in school but that's out of fashion now for no reason. eyeroll

Several logins to manage. Apps that erase your work if you hit the wrong thing. Weird interfaces. Jank galore. Just use the fucking basics. You don't need a custom app for every single thing. Email exists. Use it.

yeah my 6 y/o hates remembering passwords. Fear of getting her password wrong almost made her afraid to use computers at all