Brian Pomeroy: Lost in the Ether

One of the trade-offs I'm always struggling to make as a programmer is how much instrumentation to put in my code. Instrumentation is when the program writes to a log or somehow keeps track of what it is doing while it is doing it.

On Friday, Brian Pomeroy came to visit batBack and signed up. Yay Brian! Unfortunately, something very ugly happened to Brian. I can only hope he is still okay. Those asp pages can really bite at times.

The logs tell part of the mystery. Somehow, his GUID (his unique identifier given to him by the computer) was invalid. He struggled with the screen, valiantly reloading it a ocuple of times. In the end, it looks like he managed to get a valid user ID and sign up for batBack.

Except he didn't. In the Person table, there ain't no Brian there.

That's about all I know. Because I instrumented my code, I was able to tell that Brian came in, what IP he came in from, that he reloaded the page a couple of times, that there was an error, and that the system in the end thought he had signed up. What Brian thought is anybody's guess.

What I did NOT instrument is Brian's email address. So I'm stuck with a random name and IP number for somebody who had a bug. Not really sure what to do with that. Next time, I'm logging the email address as well.

In a free online service, like batBack, the relationship between user and programming team changes a lot. If they're paying you, they have a tendency to call up and yell ugly names at you when your program doesn't work. But if it's free? They'll just go away and never come back. I think as more teams start writing in this Brave New World of software, we're all going to have to figure out better ways to do some of the traditional tasks like debugging and user acceptance.

This gets even more gnarly if you're doing distributed virtual development. I know a lot of times corporations buy these huge bug-tracking and collaboration systems, but I'm not sure if these systems provide more political cover than they do customer service. Still -- they are probably a lot better than nothing.

Brian. If you're out there, sorry about that! I've looked at the code and I'm unable to determine what happened. It sure would be great to hear what happened from your side.