Knowledge/Domain
How to know things, and how to avoid being confidently wrong.
22 notes, plus everything one link away
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Most connected first
A failure that produces no signal, so the absence of an error reads as success.
Method·44 connections
The measurement that arbitrates, as opposed to the artifact that merely reports.
Method·30 connections
A statement that holds only because its subject set is empty — a green result that measured nothing.
Method·25 connections
Choosing identifiers so the code states its own meaning without commentary.
Method·21 connections
Escalating past the visible symptom until you find the layer that actually produced it.
Documentation that has drifted from the system it describes, and is now worse than none.
Method·20 connections
A causal explanation that was inferred rather than tested, and reads as more rigorous for being specific.
Method·19 connections
The recorded origin of a change or a claim — who made it, when, and on what evidence.
Method·18 connections
The smallest set of steps that reliably produces a fault, and the unit of real debugging.
Method·17 connections
A claim is only worth something if you know what observation would refute it.
Method·16 connections
A previously working behaviour that a change has broken.
How much of a system's internal state can be inferred from what it emits.
Method·15 connections
Reading a truncated result as if it were the whole result, so every counterexample is invisible.
A statement of the form "the last one" or "nothing else does this" — load-bearing, and only as good as the search behind it.
Method·13 connections
When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.
Crash at the point of misconfiguration rather than degrading quietly into a wrong state.
Method·12 connections
Do not remove something whose purpose you cannot explain.
Method·11 connections
The future cost of a present shortcut, metaphorically accruing interest.
A stated number pulls subsequent estimates toward it, regardless of relevance.
Method·9 connections
Prose inside source code, useful only when it records a constraint the code cannot state.
A substituted value that papers over a missing input and hides the misconfiguration that produced it.
Marking something as superseded and scheduled for removal, without removing it yet.