The industry seems to have very low standards. Let's let these mistakes happen over and over and let's just patch them as we go. No long-term thinking.
Someone should collect all these horrible incidents and start a university course on just plainly what NOT to do.
Don't sit in an ivory tower and throw stones in glass houses. Can you guarantee that your own SDLC house is in order? Because it might be, right up until a sneaky edge case nips you in the butt, and then suddenly it isn't.
Why should we just sweep this under the rug and call it a day? There is something very important that can be learned from this. Apparently, FB themselves have not learned, because this is not the first time this has happened. Why was this allowed to happen more than once? Did Apple, Google, Spotify, Facebook etc not take any actions?
"Shit happens" is one way to look at it. Another way is to question whether we as software engineers are really doing our job properly.
> FB themselves have not learned, because this is not the first time this has happened.
They have tens of thousands of engineers likely split into hundreds of different teams/microservices focussing on different parts of their software stack. A ton of them are new to it and nobody knows every part of the stack so shit can happen.
What is the biggest engineering organization size you have worked for and what was your uptime?
The linked issue makes it very clear that the "tiny outage" affects literally every app that has the Facebook SDK merely linked, for a frankly dumb reason (static initialization) that they should have learned from the last time it happened.
It's not a SaaS. "Uptime" for a linked library is stupid.
They're using static initialization and it bit them in the ass again. They should stop using it because it is prone to things like this which result in apps not launching at all. I'd like to see them commit to stop using this method to initialize themselves, and take responsibility for the crashes. Then, IMO, we'd be good.
In a scenario like this, I'd hope they'd want to make this bug's recurrence impossible.
Here is our Android config in case anyone's interested:
<meta-data android:name="com.facebook.sdk.AutoLogAppEventsEnabled" android:value="false"/>
<meta-data android:name="com.facebook.sdk.AdvertiserIDCollectionEnabled"
android:value="false"/>
<meta-data android:name="com.facebook.sdk.AutoInitEnabled"
android:value="false"/>Like they work in many other companies.
In any case, this is not about being bright but about being diligent.