<story><title>Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)</title><url>https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ledauphin</author><text>The blame here may indeed lie with whoever decided that reusing an old flag was a good idea. As anyone who has been in software development for any time can attest, this decision was not necessarily - and perhaps not even likely - made by a &amp;quot;developer.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>lopkeny12ko</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure how automated deployments would have solved this problem. In fact, if anything, it would have magnified the impact and fallout of the problem.&lt;p&gt;Substitute &amp;quot;a developer forgot to upload the code to one of the servers&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;the deployment agent errored while downloading the new binary&amp;#x2F;code onto the server and a bug in the agent prevented the error from being surfaced.&amp;quot; Now you have the same failure mode, and the impact happens even faster.&lt;p&gt;The blame here lies squarely with the developers--the code was written in a non-backwards-compatible way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>manicennui</author><text>9 times out of 10, I see developers making the mistakes that everyone seems to want to blame on non-technical people. There is a massive amount of software being written by people with a wide range of capabilities, and a large number of developers never master the basics. It doesn&amp;#x27;t help that some of the worst tools &amp;quot;win&amp;quot; and offer little protection against many basic mistakes.</text></comment>
<story><title>Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)</title><url>https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ledauphin</author><text>The blame here may indeed lie with whoever decided that reusing an old flag was a good idea. As anyone who has been in software development for any time can attest, this decision was not necessarily - and perhaps not even likely - made by a &amp;quot;developer.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>lopkeny12ko</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure how automated deployments would have solved this problem. In fact, if anything, it would have magnified the impact and fallout of the problem.&lt;p&gt;Substitute &amp;quot;a developer forgot to upload the code to one of the servers&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;the deployment agent errored while downloading the new binary&amp;#x2F;code onto the server and a bug in the agent prevented the error from being surfaced.&amp;quot; Now you have the same failure mode, and the impact happens even faster.&lt;p&gt;The blame here lies squarely with the developers--the code was written in a non-backwards-compatible way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andersa</author><text>I wonder if this code was written in c++ or similar, the flags were actually a bitfield, and they repurposed it because they ran out of bits.&lt;p&gt;Need a space here? Oh, let&amp;#x27;s throw out this junk nobody used in 8 years and there we go...</text></comment>