Bug amnesia is very real! As technologists, I feel it is important for us to cultivate the skill of noticing and remembering bugs, because the default seems to be that we apply all of our expertise and faculties to develop workarounds and then we internalize the workarounds and forget about the bugs. This is fine for lone-wolf tasks but leads to all sorts of mismatched expectations in groups.<p>Installing linux is my go-to example. To the intuition of a typical technologist, it's a trivial and highly reliable task. Whenever I go through the exercise in TFA and force myself to actually pay attention to the places where I must apply expertise to work around issues that would otherwise be extremely difficult to navigate, I usually count around 5 showstoppers and a dozen minor bugs. Things like "the install instructions say to hold down F2 or F10 to get into the BIOS, but per the blink-and-you'll-miss-it BIOS info page it's actually F11 and if you actually hold it down the stuck-key detection ignores it so you have to spam-press the key instead." The world is full of these things and it's easy to lose sight of them if you don't force yourself to remember.
At first, I thought he was writing about bugs in his own software (reported issues, on which he is the assigned engineer).<p>He's talking about bugs that he encounters, using everyone else's software.<p>Yeah, this was written years ago, but it looks like things have not improved with age.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/dO9nxRjIv2A?t=90" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/dO9nxRjIv2A?t=90</a>
Even if you don't intend to publish your list I highly recommend keeping a note of every bug you run into.<p>Once you're looking for bugs you'll start to notice them everywhere. I've built up a lot of habits around reloading and restarting various screens on my phone that were completely invisible to me until the list I was keeping caused me to start paying attention: <a href="https://twitter.com/bmc_/status/1309209159695388672" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/bmc_/status/1309209159695388672</a>
The iOS mail app has had the inbox bug for years, where it displays the unread messages app before it downloads the messages and sometimes retains it after the messages have been read.<p>That said, some bugs in Music that I thought would never get fixed (they were there for years also), did eventually get fixed, so I can keep some semblance of hope.
A couple of small past threads:<p><i>One Week of Bugs (2014)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22094844" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22094844</a> - Jan 2020 (5 comments)<p><i>Why is software so buggy?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15838200" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15838200</a> - Dec 2017 (1 comment)
IMO, this post takes a left turn off the freeway when it segues into fuzz testing. Those are super effective, no doubt, but I've come to the conclusion that finding bugs isn't the hard part.<p>Dan even admits fixing them is the hard part:<p>> why don't you fix the bugs yourself? I do fix some bugs, but there literally aren't enough hours in a week for me to debug and fix every bug I run into.