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More Attention to Detail
This Time It’s Bugs
This post from Dave Winer makes for a fascinating read - and allows you to get your inner geek on … two extracts …
But my code was erroneously constructing the permalink by smashing together the hour, month and second.
And
How could one make such a mistake you might ask? A month and a minute, what do they have in common that could confuse a computer? Well, in the language of dateformat, a package used to format dates, a month is noted as “mm” and the minute as “MM”. So the errant programmer literally asked for the month by specifying the permalink as “ddmmss” when it should have been “ddMMss”. This, my friends, is where the bug was buried. ;-)
Here’s the thing … by reading Dave’s post you can really easily see the attention to detail you need to have to debug code - and on the flip side get an insight as to how easily errors are made - and why they can go so long in the wild without being found. Simply (in so many ways) Brilliant.