Beware the Happy Flow

/via https://www.monkeyuser.com/2018/happy-flow/

We all have some variation of the Happy Flow, (the Golden Path, the Happy Day…). You know the drill — it’s the optimal situation, the one that we’re all aiming for, where there are no exceptions, error conditions, or BadThings™ happening.

It’s actually a good thing, in that it allows us to focus, and make sure that we get the important parts Just Right. Heck, it’s actually baked philosophically into erlang, in the form of Let It Crash (•).

And then again, it can be a Very Bad Thing, if you get tunnel vision, and start believing that your version of the Happy Flow is the One True Way. I mean, have you thought about the RealUsers™ out there, who have their own version of reality? After all, your tunnel vision is only valid if you also represent the vast majority of the RealUsers™. (and yes, that’s why you need metrics!).

And then of course there is the oh-so-common situation where you get so fixated on the Happy Flow, that you forget — or don’t bother! — to clean up the exceptions. It doesn’t have to be incompetence, or malice — it could just be deadlines, time-pressures, and the urgency to get the product out the door, but either way you end up with unhandled edge cases. And don’t forget, so many of the catastrophic errors out there are caused by poor error handling!

The bottom line here is that you need to be able to step back every now and then, and look at what you’re doing in context…

(•) “The Zen of Erlang” by Fred Hebert. Read it.