alt Hacker NewsDo people actually believe these dot points or are they just out of scope for most applications to tackle beyond letting the user try again?
Replies
rusk • today at 5:22 AM
Perfect demonstration of the fallacies in action! If you were used to developing applications on a self contained platform you would think something like “sure, if it fails the user can try again”
On a distributed system the user can only try again if the platform has remained stable, the failure is transient (*) and they have (crucially) have been given the information to retry.
The platform that provides a stable environment for the user to just try again has been built on these principles.
(*) there is one administrator assumes it is within the user’s power to resolve the issue
I have had a developer with anger issues expect 100% success with FTP file transfers, and anything that failed was 100% my fault as a Linux/Oracle administrator.
These FTP sessions were running over WANs connecting Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Tennessee.
I ended up writing him an "until curl ftp://...; do echo it failed again; done" loop which calmed that particular issue down.
I don't miss that guy, not even 1%. Good riddance.