The Good Bad Bug: Fail Your Way to Better Code
summary
Concrete examples and actionable rules: FAA-style incident reporting that treats accidents as system failures, a cited statistic of 3.1 car deaths versus 0.5 plane deaths per million miles (64:1 death ratio), the Space Invaders speed bug that creates the difficulty curve, the buggy chase AI that becomes Grand Theft Auto, Silent Hill’s fog workaround that both fixes rendering and adds atmosphere. Recommends three steps—blameless post-mortems, collect lots of data, extract patterns—plus simple tools like paper logs, detailed failure fields, and pair-debugging.
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chapters (23)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:55A Flat Tire
- 4:46Statistics
- 6:06What is failure
- 8:18Space Invader
- 11:18Success vs Failure
- 13:08Video Game Development
- 14:39The GDD
- 15:21The Unhappy Reality
- 16:45Dense Fog
- 17:36Systems Save Lives
- 18:48We Are Not All Pilots
- 19:08Avoid Placing Blame
- 19:57Critical Error Example
- 20:55Individual Contribution
- 21:48Document Everything
- 22:29Documentation
- 23:16Data
- 24:31Your Documentation
- 25:19Learning from Failure
- 26:59Experimentation
- 27:29Fail Publicly
- 34:17Advice for Leaders
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