Ask HN: Have you directly authored a high-profile massive bug? How does it feel?
4 comments
I was working on one of the biggest open access publishing platforms and the world and under pressure I rolled up an upgrade that wasn't properly tested and then spent about a month trying to make it work before the team gave up, rolled back to an earlier version. I got sidelined and worked on other systems, my contract wasn't renewed and I was looking for a job 8 months later with a really bad attitude.
There was a lot of crazy politics but it turned out that the team was completely reorganized and a lot of people left that year, including my boss and her boss and the head of the organization. It led that platform to confront the sustainability, funding and management issues that had been neglected up until then.
I'm certainly not 100% responsible for what happened but I was probably the only person who could have stopped the disaster but had I done so I probably would have lost my job anyway.
There was a lot of crazy politics but it turned out that the team was completely reorganized and a lot of people left that year, including my boss and her boss and the head of the organization. It led that platform to confront the sustainability, funding and management issues that had been neglected up until then.
I'm certainly not 100% responsible for what happened but I was probably the only person who could have stopped the disaster but had I done so I probably would have lost my job anyway.
That's crazy. That's generally scapegoat-ing territory...
I'd like to know more about the social network for the secret society though
I'd like to know more about the social network for the secret society though
For that one we started with something like PHPnuke which had message boards and many other features and customized it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quill_and_Dagger
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But I keep thinking how the author of the Cloudflare's Rust unwrap code feels right now. Yes, processes should have prevented it and so on, but...have any of you been directly involved in a similar high profile bug?
How does it feel months/years later, do you find yourself thinking about it? Do coworkers know about it, how does your environment change?