Needless to say i’m talking about the oversimplified and misleading version of the Schrödinger’s cat paradigm, where he is both dead and alive until you watch it.
I don’t have a job but i follow theater courses at an academy. And my improvisation is both funny and awful until i show it to others.
Code is both great and terrible until it compiles.
Site reliability engineer here, your application is both alive and dead until the monitoring server pings its health status API.
In programming there is also the Heisenbug: as soon as you try to observe the bug, it disappears or changes its behavior.
I fucking hate Heisenbergs!
Hrm, weird reproducible bug. Ok let’s hook up the ol’ debugger and… Where did the bug go? Shiiiiiiit.
My company is basically 30 startups in a trenchcoat. The bulk of our my org’s application was written 5-10 years ago by like 4 dudes, none of whom work at the company anymore. Cowboy coding doesn’t come close. We have so much legacy code and I alternate between “how the fuck does this work” in an impressed way and a horrified way anytime I look at it