Jennifer Aniston's most tantalising hint yet that she's found her best friend as she shares a VERY telling snap
UK toughens Online Safety Act with ban on self-harm content
Tech companies will be legally required to prevent content involving self-harm from appearing on their platforms – rather than responding and removing it – in a planned amendment to the UK's controversial Online Safety Act.…
Revealed: The massive flaws in Shabana Mahmood's visa plan to crack down on small boats
Alexander Isak breaks silence on his bad blood with Newcastle and £125m Liverpool transfer - and vows to tell his side of the story
Labour taxes force £17bn Manchester Utd tycoon Jim Ratcliffe out of Britain
What's next Tom Phillips' children after they were forced to live in the wild with their dad - before he was shot dead by police
Nottingham Forest SACK Nuno Espirito Santo in 80-word statement: Owner Evangelos Marinakis wields the axe - and ex-Premier League manager is favourite to take over
British 'drug smugglers' now face the DEATH penalty after 'attempting to sneak 1.3kg of cocaine into Bali'
What will happen to Erin Patterson's fortune? Details emerge about her wealth - and how she got it
'90s TV star cuts a youthful figure at 81 on rare sighting... can you guess who?
The luxury electric SUV designed to look like a petrol model: Mercedes GLC has combustion car features - but an AI brain
Travel expert explains how 'airline shuffling' can help you find cheap flights in September
Microsoft veteran's worst Windows bug was Pinball running at 5,000 FPS
Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has come clean and admitted that the worst bug he ever shipped was in... Pinball.…
He shot a policeman, made his children live in the wild for years and even took one of them on armed robberies. So why are so many still saying New Zealand's fugitive dad died a victim?
Gemini App Finally Expands To Audio Files
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Olly Murs' ambitious plan for Chelmsford after huge BBC music festival success
Humiliation for Macron as his government LOSES confidence vote and plunges France into chaos after desperate warning: 'don't make the same mistake as the British'
Councillor says Katie Price & Kerry Katona event will be 'bursting with personality'
Councillor says Katie Price & Kerry Katona event will be 'bursting with personality'
Myopic Focus
Chops was a developer for Initrode. Early on a Monday, they were summoned to their manager Gary's office before the caffeine had even hit their brain.
Gary glowered up from his office chair as Chops entered. This wasn't looking good. "We need to talk about the latest commit for Taskmaster."
Taskmaster was a large application that'd been around for decades, far longer than Chops had been an employee. Thousands of internal and external customers relied upon it. Refinements over time had led to remarkable stability, its typical uptime now measured in years. However, just last week, their local installation had unexpectedly suffered a significant crash. Chops had been assigned to troubleshooting and repair.
"What's wrong?" Chops asked.
"Your latest commit decreased the number of unit tests!" Gary replied as if Chops had slashed the tires on his BMW.
Within Taskmaster, some objects that were periodically generated were given a unique ID from a pool. The pool was of limited size and required scanning to find a spare ID. Each time a value was needed, a search began where the last search ended. IDs returned to the pool as objects were destroyed would only be reused when the search wrapped back around to the start.
Chops had discovered a bug in the wrap-around logic that would inevitably produce a crash if Taskmaster ran long enough. They also found that if the number of objects created exceeded the size of the pool, this would trigger an infinite loop.
Rather than attempt to patch any of this, Chops had nuked the whole thing and replaced it with code that assigned each object a universally unique identifier (UUID) from a trusted library UUID generator within its constructor. Gone was the bad code, along with its associated unit tests.
Knowing they would probably only get in a handful of words, Chops wonderered how on earth to explain all this in a way that would appease their manager. "Well—"
"That number must NEVER go down!" Gary snapped.
"But—"
"This is non-negotiable! Roll it back and come up with something better!"
And so Chops had no choice but to remove their solution, put all the janky code back in place, and patch over it with kludge. Every comment left to future engineers contained a tone of apology.
Taskmaster became less stable. Time and expensive developer hours were wasted. Risk to internal and external customers increased. But Gary could rest assured, knowing that his favored metric never faltered on his watch.