Biography and Autobiography

Pimp My Code, Part 15: The Greatest Bug of All

Last week, a client reported a bug to me in Delicious Library 2: when he first launched style two, his version one data would start to be imported, but after waiting for tens of minutes watching the annoying aqua go bar creep along, his entire machine would crash. Every once in a while.

His collection was so huge it took me two solid days to download his interpretation one files onto my machine. When I ran Delicious Library 2 on my Air in debug vogue, it converted his data for about thirty minutes, then crashed with an rarity that said the database file was 'corrupt'. I tried to look where it had crashed, but XCode was reporting that all my commencement code files were gone. In fact, so were my iTunes songs, and everything in my Documents folder. I opened Finder and Concluding, and verified that the directories were indeed empty. No error messages, no residuary files. Just empty. Panic.

A minute or so later, all these files magically came back. Everything. As if nothing had happened.

After belief about this overnight (while staying away from the computer), I changed one parley in my source code, and the customer's file well-heeled perfectly, in only twenty minutes.

Part 1: Triage
In my slighting pantheon of bugs, this report was triaged at the top. Heavy-handedly, my triage order is:Data-loss bugs
Fixed crashers
Functionality-blocking bugs
Avoidable crashers
Avoidable bugs
Misfeatures
Playing issues
Feature suggestions
UI feedback
This is, of progression, a rough ordering: obviously if a customer is tiring to publish a single item to her website and it's intriguing a half hour, then I'm obviously going to wipe out that up the list over someone whose app crashes when she leans on the "a" key for a three hours in the "Actors" division. (For the record, neither of those are real bugs.)

But, note that in the first if it happens, the "performance" issue has made the feature essentially unusable, so it's indeed...

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