Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

(jsomers.net)

303 points FigurativeVoid | 1 comments | 14 Oct 24 18:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source

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JohnMakin ◴[14 Oct 24 20:55 UTC] No.41841889[source]▶

I wasn’t aware there was a term for this or that this was not common knowledge - for me I refer to them as “if I fix this, it will break EVERYTHING” cases that come up in my particular line of work frequently, and my peers generally tend to understand as well. Cause/effect in complex symptoms is of course itself complex, which is why the first thing I typically do in any environment is set up metrics and monitoring. If you have no idea what is going on at a granular level, you’ll quickly jump to bad conclusions and waste a lot of time aka $.

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K0balt ◴[14 Oct 24 21:15 UTC] No.41842110[source]▶

>>41841889 #

This is horrifying, and needs a trigger warning lol. It gave me a sense of panic to read it. It’s always bad when you get so lost in the codebase that it’s just a dark forest of hidden horrors.

When this kind of thing tries to surface, it’s a warning that you need to 10x your understanding of the problem space you are adjacent to.

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1. JohnMakin ◴[14 Oct 24 21:24 UTC] No.41842190[source]▶

>>41842110 #

I guess I’ve worked in a lot of ancient legacy systems that develop over multiple decades - there’s always haunted forests and swaths of arcane or forgotten knowledge. One time I inherited a kubernetes cluster in an account no one knew how to access and when finally hacking into it discovered troves of crypto mining malware shit. It had been serving prod traffic quietly untouched for years. This kind of thing is crazy common, I find disentangling these types of projects to be fun, personally, depending on how much agency I have. But I’m not really a software developer.

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