#silentfailure — Public Fediverse posts

All Systems Operational screams https://status.flickr.net/ whilst the new app will upload a picture from an iphone... "rarely". Great value for money this week. #silentfailure

There's a design decision that looks like resilience and acts like rot. You catch the error, return something that looks like success, and the system keeps running.

Nobody gets paged. The error rate stays flat. And the thing that should have happened just… didn't.

Most systems have more suppression than their owners realize. So do most organizations.

https://www.paulwelty.com/silence-by-design/

#SystemsThinking #SoftwareDesign #OrganizationalDesign #Leadership #SilentFailure

There's a design decision that looks like resilience and acts like rot. You catch the error, return something that looks like success, and the system keeps running.

Nobody gets paged. The error rate stays flat. And the thing that should have happened just… didn't.

Most systems have more suppression than their owners realize. So do most organizations.

https://www.paulwelty.com/silence-by-design/

#SystemsThinking #SoftwareDesign #OrganizationalDesign #Leadership #SilentFailure

It seems to "just happen" in some #projects. `poetry install` should set up executable scripts in the venv's bin dir for them - but it just doesn't do it. And no matter how high you crank the verbosity, it will not emit a single #diagnostic to tell you *why* it isn't doing it. At one point I thought it only happened with projects using src-layout - but I'm not so sure about that now.

Documentation? Of course there's no mention of it. It should Just Work.

2/x

#JustWork #SilentFailure

It seems to "just happen" in some #projects. `poetry install` should set up executable scripts in the venv's bin dir for them - but it just doesn't do it. And no matter how high you crank the verbosity, it will not emit a single #diagnostic to tell you *why* it isn't doing it. At one point I thought it only happened with projects using src-layout - but I'm not so sure about that now.

Documentation? Of course there's no mention of it. It should Just Work.

2/x

#JustWork #SilentFailure