That's what bothers me. He's happy about it in 2013 (this article's two years old.) He has hindsight now and still thinks it was a good idea to request resources on a web server without being asked. No consideration at all to the cumulative effects of such an action =(
And apparently a lot of people here agree with him. Scary :/
"But now I look back & realize that we did the right thing. Seriously, how risky was this feature?"
By "the right thing" he's referring to checking in a relatively minor and risk-free feature late at night without going through the corporate bureaucracy at Microsoft.
Besides, I think you're making a big deal out of it. It's supposed to be an entertaining story about how favicon.ico came into existence, not a deep analysis of whether it was the correct way to implement it.
I wrote a big long thing, and made a mountain out of a molehill, but here's the condensed version :
Even though this article is just intended to be a cute quip about the origins of something we all take for granted, if I were a person who was negatively affected due to the author skipping 'corporate bureaucracy at Microsoft'( perhaps a victim of this kind of bug[1] ), i'd probably find the authors "how risky was this feature?" statement to be pretty irritating.
Is there any way to know that such a bug would have been included had they followed procedure? Of course not. But, we do know that those procedures and processes exist for that very reason : to ship a higher quality product
>>But, we do know that those procedures and processes exist for that very reason : to ship a higher quality product
Not always. It is possible for procedures and processes to exist simply because someone somewhere is trying to justify receiving a paycheck. This is especially true for large bureaucracies.
And sometimes, procedures and processes exist because the organization simply does not realize that they are outdated and unnecessary. "This is how we have always done it" is a common saying in large organizations that have been around for a long time.
Bottom line: don't put much faith in procedures and processes. Question everything.
But it wasn't the right thing. That bureaucracy would have saved the world billions upon billions of useless HTTP GET requests that just return 404s. It was relatively minor to him only because he only thought about it on a small scale. But when you're talking about the web, you have to take the full scale into account.
And no, it's not really a crisis-level issue. The modern web is full of hundreds of little annoyances, it's pretty much the nature of the game. But I felt it was on-topic all the same.
But yeah, complaining about it here certainly isn't going to change anything; and I'll agree that the story behind it was interesting to hear even if I despise the result of it.
