It’s about not ignoring the clear underlying cause of the bug that is screaming at everyone who reads the bug description.
Include something along the lines of “We will use the URL crate and utilize its API to avoid trivial URL construction errors like this one in the future”, and I may take your postmortem seriously.
A flawless developer does not exist, and at no point did I fault any developer directly for their development work. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore something that is/was clearly and inherently wrong with the code. You would think this is all stating the obvious.
So it’s not "just don’t write buggy code in the first place!”. It’s “this code could clearly have been written in a way that would have prevented this bug from ever taking place”.
And yes, good code matters. A good language matters. A good type system matters. A good use of a good language with its type system, patterns, abstractions, ecosystem, and all it got to offer matters. This is Rust afterall. If those things don’t matter, then we might as well let the code be written in Python or JS, and fully recommit to the church of TDD.
That basically is the same as saying “next time we will write correct code” in your postmortem, which I don’t think is very useful. It’s much more useful to say “our code is not structured in a way that makes testing easy” and “our smoke tests should cover the thing that broke.” That gives you something actionable to work on that will actually prevent this from happening in the future. Otherwise, you’ll end up writing essentially the same postmortem over and over again, each time saying “we will write correct code.”
See this postmortem from Cloudflare as an example.
Under “What went wrong”, point 1 and 3:
1. An engineer wrote a regular expression that could easily backtrack enormously.
3. The regular expression engine being used didn’t have complexity guarantees.
And on what needed to done, point 4
4. Switching to either the re2 or Rust regex engine which both have run-time guarantees.
See! Plenty of procedural talk in that postmortem. Plenty of corporate talk too. But you have to mention that a bad backtracking regex was used. And you have to mention that using regexes with no complexity guarantees was glaringly wrong. To not have done so would have been silly. To not even come close to mentioning those things beyond the specific error in that specific regex, and you wouldn’t have been taken seriously.
A good language matters. A good type system matters. A good use of a good language with its type system, patterns, abstractions, ecosystem, and all it got to offer matters.
Eh research shows otherwise. Rust eliminates defects for a very particular set of problems, but when it comes to logical correctness it isn’t better or worse than other languages. If those problems are prominent in your domain(such as you have to write a ton of concurrent code), Rust makes sense. Otherwise being well rested will have a bigger impact on the quality of your code than the best type system in the world.
In terms of dev practices, the only practice demonstrated to have a consistent positive impact on code quality is code reviews. Testing as well, but whether it’s TDD or other kinds of testing doesn’t really matter.
Eh research shows otherwise. Rust eliminates defects for a very particular set of problems, but when it comes to logical correctness it isn’t better or worse than other languages.
Can you concede, at least to yourself, that you made ^ this ^ up?
By the way, what you claimed “research shows” is so ridiculous that it’s hilarious that you wrote it while being serious.
Hell, I cheekily mentioned Python and JS in particular because the former introduced type hints and the latter triggered creating TS as a saner shield.
Btw, that wrongly-constructed URL wasn’t even an external one. We literally have web frameworks that make sure non-external URLs with invalid paths are impossible to construct. In other words, attempting to construct a wrong one would be a compile error.
By the way, what you claimed “research shows” is so ridiculous that it’s hilarious that you wrote it while being serious.
There is still no research that definitively shows that static types reduce defects more than dynamic types, this is a fact. Turns out we are incredibly bad at studying this, so I don’t know how you can say definitively that it is the case when even the people who study this for a living are not able to make that case.
I’d probably have just stuck with strings as well.
And this argument works as long as nothing wrong happens. Well, something wrong happened ;)
Smashing strings together is how this bug happened.
Constructing URLs reliably should have been the obvious first takeaway, was my point, instead of pretending the issue is not there.
If Url::join() is somehow too confusing for some, then there are other ways to do it with simpler API, no problem.
I can’t tell if your comment is intentionally sarcastic but it sure sounds like you’re saying “just don’t write buggy code in the first place!”
It’s about not ignoring the clear underlying cause of the bug that is screaming at everyone who reads the bug description.
Include something along the lines of “We will use the URL crate and utilize its API to avoid trivial URL construction errors like this one in the future”, and I may take your postmortem seriously.
A flawless developer does not exist, and at no point did I fault any developer directly for their development work. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore something that is/was clearly and inherently wrong with the code. You would think this is all stating the obvious.
So it’s not "just don’t write buggy code in the first place!”. It’s “this code could clearly have been written in a way that would have prevented this bug from ever taking place”.
And yes, good code matters. A good language matters. A good type system matters. A good use of a good language with its type system, patterns, abstractions, ecosystem, and all it got to offer matters. This is Rust afterall. If those things don’t matter, then we might as well let the code be written in Python or JS, and fully recommit to the church of TDD.
That basically is the same as saying “next time we will write correct code” in your postmortem, which I don’t think is very useful. It’s much more useful to say “our code is not structured in a way that makes testing easy” and “our smoke tests should cover the thing that broke.” That gives you something actionable to work on that will actually prevent this from happening in the future. Otherwise, you’ll end up writing essentially the same postmortem over and over again, each time saying “we will write correct code.”
False dichotomy much!
See this postmortem from Cloudflare as an example.
Under “What went wrong”, point 1 and 3:
And on what needed to done, point 4
See! Plenty of procedural talk in that postmortem. Plenty of corporate talk too. But you have to mention that a bad backtracking regex was used. And you have to mention that using regexes with no complexity guarantees was glaringly wrong. To not have done so would have been silly. To not even come close to mentioning those things beyond the specific error in that specific regex, and you wouldn’t have been taken seriously.
Eh research shows otherwise. Rust eliminates defects for a very particular set of problems, but when it comes to logical correctness it isn’t better or worse than other languages. If those problems are prominent in your domain(such as you have to write a ton of concurrent code), Rust makes sense. Otherwise being well rested will have a bigger impact on the quality of your code than the best type system in the world.
In terms of dev practices, the only practice demonstrated to have a consistent positive impact on code quality is code reviews. Testing as well, but whether it’s TDD or other kinds of testing doesn’t really matter.
Can you share that research?
https://youtu.be/WELBnE33dpY
It’s not that there is evidence that it doesn’t matter, but there is no evidence showing that it does.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/WELBnE33dpY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Can you concede, at least to yourself, that you made ^ this ^ up?
By the way, what you claimed “research shows” is so ridiculous that it’s hilarious that you wrote it while being serious.
Hell, I cheekily mentioned Python and JS in particular because the former introduced type hints and the latter triggered creating TS as a saner shield.
Btw, that wrongly-constructed URL wasn’t even an external one. We literally have web frameworks that make sure non-external URLs with invalid paths are impossible to construct. In other words, attempting to construct a wrong one would be a compile error.
There is still no research that definitively shows that static types reduce defects more than dynamic types, this is a fact. Turns out we are incredibly bad at studying this, so I don’t know how you can say definitively that it is the case when even the people who study this for a living are not able to make that case.
Honestly
url.joinlooks like a cluster-fuck of landmines to me: https://github.com/servo/rust-url/issues/333I’d probably have just stuck with strings as well.
And this argument works as long as nothing wrong happens. Well, something wrong happened ;)
Smashing strings together is how this bug happened.
Constructing URLs reliably should have been the obvious first takeaway, was my point, instead of pretending the issue is not there. If
Url::join()is somehow too confusing for some, then there are other ways to do it with simpler API, no problem.