• 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle










  • IMO it doesn’t really matter what you said the method was for. If you change the format of a string that is returned by a method that returns a string, there’s a risk of breaking user code, even if it’s just in the context of their dev environment.

    Philosophically, whether or not the behavior of your API has changed is completely disconnected from whether or not others are using it “right”. If I can depend on a function to return a certain type of value when given certain arguments, and if it doesn’t produce other side effects, then it doesn’t matter what the docs say or what the function is named, I can use it in any context where I need that type of return value and have this type of arguments available. This type of function is just mapping data to other data. If you modify the function in such a way that the return value changes after being given the same arguments, that’s a breaking change in my book.




  • Once upon a time I got a job working at a swimming pool supply store. For a total of about 15 min during my very first shift I was in the main room putting price stickers on things and whatnot. For the remaining hours of my shift I was back in the chlorine room filling up chlorine tanks. Tbf the pool store was following regulations as far as I know. I had goggles and gloves and the room had a big ventilation fan and all that. But even still, I got chlorine all over my skin and clothes and was perpetually dehydrated from the fumes. Had to run to the water fountain like a million times. Afterwards I decided there was no way I was going to work with chlorine all day every day until it killed me so the next day I came in and asked the manager if there was any way I could do other work and not be in the chlorine room. He was like, “unfortunately that’s the job”. So I told him, “ok I understand. In that case I don’t think this is going to work out. Thanks for the opportunity though!” And I left after only one shift. Shortest job I ever had.


  • When I was in middle school in the mid ‘90s, the school library decided to go digital. They installed a bunch of computers with what they called “a boolean search system”. For the first time, you could search for a book by topic in the library and, after a bit of a wait bc computers were pretty slow back then, you’d get a list of results.

    Well, us being kids, on the very first day, somebody decided to search for “book”, which of course matched every single book in the library and therefore created enough system load to lock up those poor mid-‘90s computers to the point that they required a hardware restart. IIRC this system was on some kind of a network too and I believe it would also lock up the network such that the other computers couldn’t use the system either. I didn’t know much about such things at the time.

    Anyway, word got around immediately and so every single time a class came to the library, somebody would search “book” on a computer to see what would happen and lock up the whole system for hours. This went on for weeks with the punishment for searching “book” on the “boolean search system” becoming more and more severe, and then I moved to a new state so I unfortunately do not know how this story ended.