The Art of Failure (2000)

The most epic of my chokes probably was on icfp contest of 2007. Plenty of pressure, tight deadlines (icfp contests take 72 hours). There was a hard to reproduce bug in my fast dna vm implementation, and it took me like 18 hours to find that one wrong line. I think "stuck in debugging" usually means choke.

As for panic, that's more of a sysadmin thing, imo. When a RAID fails to come back after a power failure on the production server, it does take some guts to not start making random stupid moves.

From what I've seen (and felt!) one might be facing a really nasty bug which has caused a sudden crash in a production environment which is holding up many hundreds of very angry customers. Some yelling may have occurred.

You know you should sit back and reason out what the problem might be (it worked before -- what's gone wrong?) but the rookie reflex is to start coding right away and to slap something -- ANYTHING! -- in that might make things right. That should make the yelling stop!

When that doesn't work, another patch is put in. Then another, and another, corrupting data and making things even worse!

...and so the cascade of 'Hail Mary' programming fixes is put in place until someone finally pulls the plug and yanks the poor, choking programmer aside for a breather.

It's rare for programmers to have a 'do or die' moment and few are prepared for or recognize it when it comes. If you ever feel the urge to rush: Don't.

I'm not sure this quite applies to programming as done by programmers. Gladwell is talking about conscious processes interfering with unconscious processes. For us, pretty much the whole thing is conscious.

You could think of the entire organization as the athlete though. Especially in programming, the organization is unaware of exactly how things really get done, it just has certain reflexes. Under crisis it may feel the need to switch modes.

Panic: OMG the project is late! Hire more programmers! Buy someone else's thing and try to make it work!

Choke: What we're doing isn't working -- we need to hire a lot of consultants, we need more metrics before making a decision, we need to carefully plan out our scaling strategy before we make a prototype...

Tennis has very strange scoring. It's complicated to explain, but here goes:

The first person to get 6 games wins the set.*

The first person to win 4 rallies in a game wins that game.*

During a game, if you have one point your score is "15," two points is "30" and three points is "40." When you get four points or win by two, then you win the game.

*One must win by two.