There are bugs and then there are bugs.

The latest Oxide and Friends episode tells the story of an epic data corruption bug that nearly derailed Oxide’s launch.

Says CTO Bryan Cantrill:

An adage of mine is that bugs can be psychotic or nonreproducible, but not both.

And when I say psychotic I don’t mean just, like, difficult. I mean […] ripping at the fabric of reality.

The fabric of reality that is created by the computer, by the operating system, it creates these abstractions that we view as kind of bedrock abstractions. And when those start to break, that’s a psychotic bug. You know, when you have a thread that is executing on two CPUs at the same time? It’s like: it can’t be.

Such a good listen.