Comment on Oops, something went wrong!

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hperrin@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

It is intentionally and, I would argue, necessarily vague.

First, there is no time frame for these kinds of errors. If it’s just a cache host that’s down, you could retry right now and the load balancer would probably have taken that host out of rotation already. If it’s a primary db that’s down, that may take 5 minutes. If there’s no replica to promote, it might take 30 minutes. If the whole db layer is down, it might take an hour or two. If an entire release needs to be rolled back, it might take a couple hours. There are just too many scenarios and too many variables to give a useful time frame.

Second, you might appreciate an error message like that, but these error messages aren’t written for you and they’re usually not even written by developers. They’re written by designers and translated into many languages. They need to be concise, easily understood, and not easily construed as derogatory or malicious in any language. They are written for the broadest audience. You are not the broadest audience.

Third, we have to design systems as if every user is incompetent and/or malicious, because many of them are. Let me give you an example. I once got an email from another engineer using an internal system my team wrote. He said, “hey I’m getting this error, can you help?” He attached a screenshot showing an error message that read, “Your auth token has expired. Please refresh the page.” He was a senior engineer.

Fourth, and I cannot stress this enough, there is almost always nothing you can do when you hit an error like this. Any information given to you for the vast majority of these kinds of errors would be entirely useless to you. You cannot promote a db shard yourself. You cannot bring up a cache host yourself. You cannot take a host out of load balancer rotation yourself. The only reason this information could possibly benefit you is to satisfy your curiosity.

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