What are the worst mistakes in programming? I would single out two types:
- those that cause a business to lose a lot of money
- and those that are the least common.
While the first ones are immediately clear, what about the second ones? The fact is that the less often we encounter some type of error, the more difficult it is to understand what caused them.
This happened to me at work as well. One morning, the testers noticed that some requests to the backend returned a 502 (Gateway Timeout) error. This bug was a release stopper, so all the senior developers and a devops engineer took it up. At first, it was believed that Nginx returned this error, and the backend had nothing to do with it. After a while, we realized that PHP was to blame. We sinned for everything: turned off the BlackFire, changed OpCache settings, tried different patch versions in PHP, and so on. However, the error itself was not in the infrastructure, but directly in the application code.
