Bugs are a fact of life in software, and probably always will be. Some bugs are probably unavoidable, but a lot of bugs can be avoided through good architecture, defensive programming, immutability, and other techniques. One major source of bugs, especially frustrating bugs, is non-deterministic behavior. Every programmer has experienced bugs which don’t reproduce, which [...]

Since writing about stock market crashes and normal accidents, I spent even more time talking about the events of May 6th. Good analysis is starting to come out. The best I have seen so far is Nanex’s Flash Crash Analysis. Their conclusion is that the crash was precipitated primarily by a queuing and timestamping bug [...]