Fred Hebert - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Unexpected - Code BEAM SF 2018

Fred Hebert explains how to handle unexpected production bugs by building proper supervision structures and encoding predefined failure semantics.

Bugs you know you will happen in production are usually easy to handle since you know about them. The problem is that we, as humans, have limited knowledge and understanding about the problem domains we write programs for and very often about our programs themselves. This is at the root of all the surprising unexpected bugs that we actually encounter all the time. While we can become experts at being careful and well-equipped in tooling and just knowing all kinds of weird situations that can arise from code and computers being a thing that we all have to live with, there are some other approaches that can prove helpful as well. In this talk, we'll see some broad and diverse approaches to handling the unexpected, but will keep a specific focus on how building the proper supervision structures lets us encode predefined failure semantics into our programs so that we know how most errors will be handled, without even knowing what they are. More details here: codesync.global/speaker/fred-hebert/