666th post: fears and superstitions of IT specialists



    Fears and superstitions go hand in hand with developers through life. We will be frank - bugs are to blame. Everyone has bugs. Some bugs are exactly like children's horror stories that appeared in the distant past and have been unnaturally existed for decades. The irrational fear of encountering a bug (running into any failure) has led to the emergence of entertaining rites and rituals, which will be discussed in this post. Being a bagophobe is natural and not shameful, and there are a lot of ways to cope with fear.

    There are bugs like an envelope with anthrax or an ancient box in an old Native American cemetery - a thing with a distinct sign of a skull and bones. In standard Windows Notepad since 2001, there is an error that no one is going to fix. Adobe Flash is a storehouse of fundamental bugs.A critical vulnerability in the Bash shell on older devices simply cannot be closed - a bug exists in all versions of Bash created over the past 25 years. A small bug discovered in OpenSSL open source has led to the emergence of one of the main vulnerabilities in recent years. And of course, bugs that are found in discontinued versions of operating systems will remain with you forever.

    It is generally accepted that renewal is the holy grail that eliminates all problems, right? As luck would have it, some bugs are caused by an update. An example that is familiar to Apple technology owners. The iOS 9.1 firmware arrives, and the Touch ID fingerprint scanner breaks. This is far from the first (and obviously not the last) similar case. If you are a Ubuntu user, then you understand what I mean. ;) And also because of a small typo (an extra space was added) in the script of the Bumblebee driver installer (support for NVIDIA Optimus under Linux), the / usr folder was accidentally deleted from users. So bugs are omnipresent, sometimes unrecoverable, manifest in a completely unbelievable way, sometimes arise due to simply mystical coincidences. Such errors lead to the fact that users lose faith in the saving update. Now you are more likely to wait for someone else to deliver the update, and after evaluating the stability of the work, you will update yourself.

    So bugs become part of superstitions, superstitions turn into myths, and myths lead to fears. We asked our developers what fears they encountered in their work.

    Dmitry Matveev, product developer at Odnoklassniki:

    My biggest fear is that I can look for a “hard-to-reproduce mistake” where it’s not at all. That is, for example, the tester will tell me about the problem on one of the versions of the application and that the problem is not always reproduced. But I’m a programmer, I understand that there must be some reasons and conditions under which it is always reproduced. Therefore, I sit and thoroughly understand. But for some reason, either the problem is not reproduced anymore, or the fix for it does not work, but absolutely should. It was then that some kind of paranoia began to creep in, “But am I looking at all?”, “Have I lost my mind?”, Etc.

    Recently, with four pairs of eyes, they sorted out the problem, tried it, it seemed, they all gave up. A very long time did not leave work so tired. And the next day, having decided that one day would be enough to cope with the problem, no matter what she ended up with, I defeated her in a couple of hours. Because fresh ideas came to my mind and I began to sort the problem where necessary, and from the other end. :) The

    moral is this: the morning of the evening is trickier, and if something doesn’t work out well, you need to hammer on it, sleep, go to the shower and try again. ¯ \ _ (ツ) _ / ¯


    Alexandra skvot Kitova, tester in the projects Armored Warfare, CrossFire, Warface:

    I have a professional - not to be afraid of anything at all. :) In fact, the most terrible thing for us is, as my colleague aptly put it, “testing by the Schrödinger method” when the task arrives “Here came some patch ... Something was removed from it by developers, but something was added ... There are no patch notes, they will appear only in three days, and the deadline in two days, so please test EVERYTHING. ” Of the signs that you definitely need to follow, I will single out one: never close the task before a successful release!

    Alexey pifagor_mc Petrov, Director of Quality, Mail.Ru Mail:

    I'll tell you about superstition. If the feature was launched for a long time and with multiple bugs, then after the release it is necessary to build an altar of sacrifices so that there are no bugs on the production.

    There are few regressions, it is better to overtake than not to overtake.

    If the developer says: “There is one line fix”, then all conceivable and unthinkable tests should be carried out - practice shows that the more atomic the fix is, the more chances there are to break everything.

    During the rolling build on Productions come to the admins with a candle, to pray at the charts with the words "In the name of gendira, tehdira and team lead, QA!»

    Tester tester - a friend, a brother, and "Help, please, regression to drive."


    Andrew andrewsumin Sumin, Head of Client Development: Developer

    Fear is a recursion that leads to self-DDoS. And when you roll the release and see the shelf on the chart. You roll back, but the shelf remains. O_o

    Olga rukolaKuritsyna, Head of Mail.Ru Homepage:

    I am very afraid of forgetting the token at home. "Suddenly a war, and I am without a token."

    Andrey mamonth Tereshko, Mail.Ru Mail programmer:

    I have such superstitions. Do not deploy to production on Friday night - to a sore head and a busy weekend. Do not commit without comment - to the bad mood of the release engineer.

    Alexey Antropov, head of the group of system administrators:

    What other superstitions are there, I have 74 tasks in line and the simultaneous launch of two projects! ..

    And especially for those who read only the introduction and conclusion in the posts, we have prepared an abridged, digest version of the post in the form of a video, from which you will learn how the fears of programmers are visualized. A bonus awaits the most patient at the end of the video: three simple things that can save an IT specialist from fears once and for all.



    Do not judge strictly, this is our first 666th post! And he fell out by accident on Friday, the 13th. What superstitions do you have?

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