To, From, Forward, Reply, ReplyAll… It was confusing. There was the simplest but most confusing bug I was working on this past week.
I’ll spare you the details but it involved a type of logged email and what should happen when a user replies to that email.
When replying to an email who do you expect it to be sent to? The person who sent the original email right? In this case the bug was that the recipients were being flipped and we were sending replies to the wrong person.
I feel like this bug taught me a few things about life.
I fixed the bug by adding some code to our code base. But something still didn’t make sense. Why was this bug happening in the first place? Why would we ever send a reply to anyone except the person who sent the original email?
But before I actually found the real case I was communicating to the team nonsense about what was happening, which made sense on the surface of things, but deep down didn’t make sense and felt wrong but I didn’t realize it in the moment.
It was only after finding the real cause did everything make sense. And this led me to the realization that…
When Something Doesn’t Make Sense, It Doesn’t Make Sense
Usually after the fact this is abundantly clear. You can see all the ways that things went wrong in a situation and say to yourself “of course”!
Actionable Change
What I should have done and what I will do next time is when I get that feeling that something doesn’t make sense or something is not right or that I don’t have enough information I will pause mid sentence and call it out. I will say “Wait a second, this doesn’t make sense. I don’t have the right information. Let me investigate and I’ll get back to this. Sorry.”
