It's Sunday... so in an attempt to bring something meaningful out of it. I decided to watch something about Design Principles as it's a current hot topic on my team and I came across this video of 'Uncle Bob' (Robert Cecil Martin) speaking at Laracon 2018.
It's a hour long talk but what grabbed my attention is at the near end of the video, he talks about being a responsible programmer.
So, a financial agency had an algorithm they used to break down a large trade into smaller chunks of trades and it was working quite well and later they wrote a new one and pushed it while keeping the old one there and just disabled it with a "flag" while that flag comes in via incoming transactions!!
Some of you might have got some tingling sensation down your spine after reading this.
Later a new tax law comes in and they modified the code to compensate for it pushed to servers but left out 1 server by "mistake" and 10 minutes later got a call from SEC. The coders panic and replace it will old code... TOTAL CHAOS! 450 million dollars down the drain in just 45 mins.
The point he was trying to make it, that the functioning of society depends upon us in many different ways and It's very predictable that one fine day some poor software guy or girl might do something stupid and kill 10000 people..
The next thing will be the government pointing fingers at us and that time you can't make excuses like our boss told us that it's very "urgent" and we had to deliver this by today evening since that would be ridiculous.
Some strict regulations might get imposed upon us in future in form of lists showing what programming languages, frameworks or even IDEs to use and what's prohibited and nobody is gonna like that.
Now I might be come off as paranoid but sooner or later this is gonna happen if we don't understand the seriousness of it.
So before the government imposes it, we should go ahead and apply some regulations by ourselves just like the doctor's community did.
The best candidate is TDD (Test Driven Development) that makes sure you and your code is reliable. I just want you folks to give it some thought. That's it. Till then adios! I will be back. Bye for now :)
Here's the link BTW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeXQEJNWO5w
Top comments (0)