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Comment by ihumanable | Hacker News Reader

The feat is impressive, but there is such a self-deprecating sense to this article that makes me sick.

Let me see if I get this straight: "While on vacation, I spent a significant amount of my time with a node in our production cluster attempting to understand this problem"

"Eventually, I discovered a race condition that allowed an SO_WRITE interest to be set on a socket but never cleared."

"Upon returning to the office and offering up one heck of a mea culpa"

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Took his own time to hunt down an extremely difficult to find bug and then fixed it. Yea, mea culpa all around. This is the kind of ridiculous attitude that has people working themselves to death.

I agree with the rest of the article, I think you should never be afraid to change and refactor your own code. This particular part of the article struck a nerve for me.

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I work with the guy and know all about the project he refers to.

Hopefully I can clarify the situation. The server application he worked on was fairly new territory for him, but moreso to us. He had experience in the language (Java) that we didn't have so it was really his project. The application has had numerous subtle bugs that never caused huge problems, just weird behaviors here and there. As time pressed on, it seemed for a while that the bugs would never cease. Keep in mind that this is a server heavy with NIO internals and several worker threads, so maintaining state is a very delicate process. Race conditions that seldom occur are perhaps the worst kind of bug to tackle.

Additionally, he's the new guy. Being the new guy is hard when tasked with such an important task. Especially when the task itself seems to haunt you every day for several weeks. We encouraged him and never once blamed him for anything (as if we would have known better?). He simply took his responsibility personally. Perhaps too personally.

This sort of humanity in software is uncommon and humbling. He's a good kid who isn't out to prove anything to anyone, just to be the best programmer (person?) he can be. I think he can be forgiven for being too self-deprecating.

I didn't mean to slag on the author, he does seem like a stand up guy with a good technical head on his shoulders. I think it bothered me because I've been that new guy that's working harder than he should and ended up burning out and setting myself back.

I can forgive him for being self-deprecating, but he should be careful to strive for a good work-life balance or all those smarts and ambitions will flame out and burn out and he will be left trying to pick himself back up.

Of course from one blog post it's hard to know what his work-life balance is, so I could just be talking out of left field. I think it resonated with me because I saw a bit of myself in what he was saying and I know that taken too far that behavior that seems like a great idea can lead you to a place you don't want to be and that I'm finally starting to get out of.

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