Programming’s Greatest Mistakes • Mark Rendle • GOTO 2023
A brilliant stand-up talk about software development mistakes that really made me laugh. Rendle is an experienced software developer, and the whole talk is a tour of screwups. He starts with one of his own, then keeps raising the stakes with a series of famous stories. Here is a quick rundown of the mishaps covered:
- The med file Unf*cker—a screwup of Rendle’s own. To deal with a bug that corrupted saved files, he wrote software to repair them, with an interesting choice of name.
- Y2K—the year 2000 problem. Years had to fit in YY, but when 2000 arrived, they needed to move to YYYY. All the software then had to be updated to accommodate the change.
- The Kennel Club’s “Dog 38”—a funny example involving numbers stored as Roman numerals.
- Enterprise Agile in the form of SAFe, Accenture’s AutoScrum 1.1 and Deloitte’s The Agile Landscape v3. The diagrams make it pretty clear that corporate Agile took a wrong turn somewhere :)
- The Pentium FPU—the floating-point problem in Intel processors. Andy Grove gave an entertaining account of it in Only the Paranoid Survive, which I have already written about.
- Null—the story of nullable values and Tony Hoare’s involvement. He called it “Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake.”
- Hartford Center—a story about how something designed in CAD does not always hold up in the real world: in this case, a building collapsing under snow.
- Knight Capital—an epic high-frequency trading story in which an emergency software update, a bug and disabled safeguards are described as bankrupting a large hedge fund in a matter of hours.
- Mariner1—a bug in a formula translated into Fortran, leading to a crash.
- Mars Climate Orbiter—imperial and metric units, inches and feet, and how a spacecraft sent to study Mars from orbit decided to land on it instead :)
- Ariane 5—the story of migrating software from Ariane4 to Ariane5, putting a 64-bit value into a 16-bit floating-point field, and what happened next.
- The Big Rewrite—another of Rendle’s own screwups.
- JavaScript—a language put together in 10 days that went on to become hugely popular and just as inconsistent :)
- Lieutenant Stanislav Petrov—how a Soviet officer prevented a potential nuclear war on September 26, 1983, after the early-warning system falsely reported an incoming US missile attack.
#Fackup #Humor #Reliability #SRE