Wednesday, August 11, 2010

How things go wrong (reprise)

About 3 years ago, I wrote a post on How things go wrong. I should have made everyone I know read it since we just ran into an issue that bit us in the ass... Yes, it was caused as a result of:
  • Lack of return value checking from system calls and
  • Lack of sufficient error checking/handling code
and further complicated by a lack of logging in the application.

I can't begin saying how important each of them are. Oh well, I only have 2 things to say:
  • You need to learn for yourself
  • You can never be too careful
  • You can't learn from other's mistakes (yes, this and the 1st one are the same thing)