Recent Feature Articles

Sep 2023

A Single Bug

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Matt's team had a party after their last release. It was a huge push, with tons of new features, that came at the end of many months of work. On the Monday after the party, they came back into work for unsurprising bad news: nothing is perfect, so there were several issues and defects that needed to be patched, quickly.

Since QA is the team responsible for signing off and approving any work, QA is the team that also owns the defect tickets. Matt and his team can't do any work without a ticket, which meant they spent almost an entire day knowing there were bugs to fix, but without any idea of what bugs to fix.


Picking Your Consultants

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Inilock started making locks back in the 1880s, and has always had a conservative approach to changing things about how locks work. But the world has moved on, and the pin-and-tumbler has given way to RFID card readers and electromagnets.

Since Inilock didn't have the internal expertise to build industrial locking systems for commercial customers, they did what any company would do: they hired highly paid consultants. The project started in 2018. These consultants went out and build a lock firmware platform, a server, and a homegrown TCP protocol to handle configuration and setup, handed it in late and over budget, cashed their checks, and vanished, by 2022.


Succesful Deployment

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Typos are the bane of delevopers' existence. For most of our typos, the result is a syntax error. It's quick and easy to find and fix. But any time we're working with strings (or in languages where variables are declared at use) there can be many more subtle bugs.

So when Abigail's company sent an intern off to fix a few typos, they thought this was a lovely little low-hanging fruit bug to fix.