"Did you know the site is down?": 20 Years of Mistakes, Failures, and Fuck-Ups

by Kerri Miller

In her talk titled "Did you know the site is down?": 20 Years of Mistakes, Failures, and Fuck-Ups, Kerri Miller reflects on her two-decade journey as a web developer. She shares insights on debugging and acknowledges common struggles faced by developers, particularly newcomers in the field.

Key Points:

- Role Model Reflection: Kerri contemplates being a role model for junior developers, noting her own flaws and the mistakes she has made over the years.

- Trigger Warnings: Before starting, she warns the audience about her use of strong language and the inclusion of animated GIFs for accessibility considerations.

- Code Example: Kerri presents an example of a bug she encountered in her code, highlighting that even experienced developers can overlook simple mistakes. She humorously refers to Angular as 'Anger-lar' due to frustrations it causes her.

- Debugging Philosophy: She emphasizes that the bug is usually in the developer's code rather than the frameworks or languages being used, humorously recounting moments of excessive searching for errors.

- Personal Anecdote: Kerri shares her background in performance arts and an experience during a theater production where she accidentally disrupted a scene as a messenger, drawing a parallel of not being where she thought she should be, much like in coding.

Conclusions/Takeaways:

- Mistakes are natural in the software development process, regardless of experience.

- Rather than putting the blame on external factors like programming frameworks, developers should focus on their own code.

- Personal stories and experiences can illuminate the realities of the development process and foster a deeper connection with junior developers looking to learn from seasoned coders.

00:00:10.429 Hey everybody, I feel like I just left the stage. I'm glad to be back. It's wonderful to be in Austin! After seeing a lot of code this morning, I want to show you some code that I wrote recently, which prompted me to kind of write this talk.

00:00:20.369 I work with a lot of junior developers, and one of them said to me a couple of months ago, 'I want to be you when I grow up.' Oh, but I'm not sure I'm the best role model. Before I go any further, I need to give a couple of trigger warnings. First, I swear a lot. I have a bit of a potty mouth, and I apologize for that; I will try to tone it down. Second, on a serious note, I have a couple of animated GIFs, so if you have any motion-related issues or accessibility concerns, I apologize in advance. In future versions, I will edit and remove those.

00:00:41.640 So, let me show you some code. Can anyone spot what I did wrong? Yes? Where were you when I spent two hours of my life on this code? I did this six weeks ago. I've been a web developer for 20 years, writing HTML code for 20 years, and I forgot something crucial.

00:00:55.500 Now, granted, there was a whole bunch of Angular data in there, but still, I'm clicking the submit button, and nothing happens. I thought, it's got to be Angular that's the problem. I call it 'Anger-lar,' because it makes me feel like this guy (referring to a meme). Any baseball fans out there? Remember Raul Lavanya? He’s a guy who takes pride in his defense. But anyway, one of my colleagues said something really true: anytime I’m fixing a bug and the solution is more than six characters, I stop. That's when I know I'm probably rewriting something fundamental.

00:01:19.190 Generally speaking, it's almost always a missing comma or semicolon, or some whitespace issue in one of those languages. It’s a nice reminder to me. I was doing everything under the sun, cracking open Angular, searching Stack Overflow, and digging through Angular's issue tracker. It got kind of crazy. You know what? The bug is never in Ruby. The bug is never in Rails core. It's your code that’s wrong ninety-nine percent of the time.

00:01:44.029 One time, I found a bug in Ruby, and it was already known; everybody knew about it, so it wasn't that exciting. I posted it online, and it got a bunch of retweets. My favorite reply came from Microsoft asking, 'How’s that Windows 8 working out for you?'

00:02:01.280 Earlier, there was someone up on stage who buried the lead about her alma mater. Go Moonbats! While I was at Goddard College, I was actually a performance major. I thought I was going to be a stagehand, essentially a lighting and set designer.

00:02:02.750 I did that for a number of years, and one of the performances I absolutely loved was 'The Scottish Play.' That summer, I got to do 'Henry V' and 'Richard III' in repertory theatre. Every night, we would have a new production, and it was such a small company that I was both a stagehand and a messenger.

00:02:38.340 One night, in a production of 'Macbeth,' I went on stage just as Macbeth received the tragic news that his wife had committed suicide. He delivered the famous speech about time creeping at a steady pace, and as the messenger, I burst in saying 'Birnam Wood is marching on Dunsinane!' This was awful and fulfilled the mad witch's prophecy of his downfall. The problem was, I wasn’t actually in the production of 'Macbeth.'