Re:Missing line in a smart contract leads to $10M hack
by alkonaut on Monday May 17, 2021 @03:25AM
(#27180852)
> First thing I do when changing or creating a thing.
Try to figure out WHY things are the way they are and run through some scenarios.
As a developer I often stumble across code and systems that are superficially idiotic. I just think "Why isn't this doing X instead?".
Here there are two approaches 1) blindly change the thing to make it better 2) Try to understand why it is wrong, and what led to the legacy design.
The sensible thing might be 2, but its also soul-crushingly boring. So I obviously always do 1. After ripping out some code and replacing it with shiny new code, you invariably find the edge cases that led to the legacy design.
They will show up as bugs, or edge cases missing. After a while, you will have iterated so that your solution might look something like the original (hopefully slightly better) but the important thing is you now have a system you understand fundamentally. You basically traded a few regressions for fundamental understanding of a system
As a developer I often stumble across code and systems that are superficially idiotic. I just think "Why isn't this doing X instead?".
Here there are two approaches 1) blindly change the thing to make it better 2) Try to understand why it is wrong, and what led to the legacy design.
The sensible thing might be 2, but its also soul-crushingly boring. So I obviously always do 1. After ripping out some code and replacing it with shiny new code, you invariably find the edge cases that led to the legacy design.
They will show up as bugs, or edge cases missing. After a while, you will have iterated so that your solution might look something like the original (hopefully slightly better) but the important thing is you now have a system you understand fundamentally. You basically traded a few regressions for fundamental understanding of a system