Lookery.com

Most of the way through the Michael Nygaard book I ref’d in the previous post, and I would say, totally worth picking up.  Beyond the just fantastic stories of software disasters, (which, apparently, I can’t get enough of), the main thing I think it has to offer is insight into the vast array of things which can go wrong.  He does sketch in some useful, design-pattern-ish things you can put in place to help save yourself, but, mostly he’s trying to communicate the idea that you have to program with assumptions of failure.  And the vivid stories of all the different kinds of failure are, I suspect, a really good way to etch that in your mind.

There’s no silver bullet for this kind of thing, but I will say, Erlang is a fantastic fit for the kind of approach he recommends.  If you use Erlang, will your software magically work in the face of component failure?  Good god, no. But, will there be a much clearer path to using timeouts everywhere, monitoring and supervising bits of the application, etc?  Yes.

-Dan M