Is there anything good written about failsafe programming? I try to code defensively so terrible bugs like this can't snowball. A heuristic like "only make 1000 trades a minute" could have saved Knight $400 million!
I try to build global failsafes into my code, particularly network code. For instance, a recent Twitter project I wrote has various loops calling their API. That code has a global counter that says "this program can only ever make 25 calls" that's enforced in the bottom level HTTP calling function. If the rest of my code is correct I'll never trip that limit, I have application-specific logic that means I should only ever need to make 10 calls. But I appreciate having the failsafe in case that more complex logic fails.
I try to build global failsafes into my code, particularly network code. For instance, a recent Twitter project I wrote has various loops calling their API. That code has a global counter that says "this program can only ever make 25 calls" that's enforced in the bottom level HTTP calling function. If the rest of my code is correct I'll never trip that limit, I have application-specific logic that means I should only ever need to make 10 calls. But I appreciate having the failsafe in case that more complex logic fails.