Programming's Greatest Mistakes
summary
A sequence of concrete software failures and their causes: a saved-query format gets corrupted by using FileWrite instead of Create and an internal recovery tool named Unf* file debacle is shipped on a floppy; Y2K fixes cost an estimated $0.5T while teams rewrite COBOL to Infomix; a Roman-numeral field overflows at 38 in the Kennel Club database; the Mars Climate Orbiter is lost to pound‑force vs Newton‑second unit mismatch; Ariane 5 self‑destructs when a 64‑bit float is cast into a 16‑bit integer; Night Capital loses $440M from a repurposed flag.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (14)
- 0:00🚀 Welcome to Build Stuff Conference
- 1:00Introduction to Programming’s Greatest Mistakes
- 3:00The Y2K Crisis – When a Good Idea Became a Worldwide Panic
- 14:00The Kennel Club 38 Bug – A Literal Overflow
- 18:00Enterprise Software Failures – Why Enterprise Software Often Fails
- 22:00Intel Pentium Bug – The Floating Point Error That Cost Millions
- 25:00The Billion-Dollar Null Mistake – Tony Hoare’s Legacy
- 29:00The Night Capital Failure – When Software Crash Impacted the Stock Market
- 31:00The Mariner 1 Incident – A Horizontal Line that Changed Everything
- 34:00The Mars Climate Orbiter Disaster – Imperial vs Metric Units
- 39:00The Aran 5 Rocket Launch Failure – Software Code and Rocket Science Don’t Mix
- 41:00Brendan Eich and JavaScript Mistakes – How JavaScript Came to Be
- 42:00The Crowdstrike Bug of 2023 – A Data Update Gone Wrong
- 44:00The Worst Programming Mistake in History – How One Man Prevented World War III
