I was embarrassed for Apple when I saw the recent bug fix for columns introduce a new bug, explained in this post by Jeff Johnson:

Without the path bar, the columns are now taller, but the vertical scrollers remain the same height as before, leaving vertical gaps, a ridiculous amount of space between the bottom of the scrollers and the bottom of the columns, looking silly and amateurish.

It’s impossible to talk about craft without talking about embarrassment, and pride, and shame, and lust, and a lot of other words – all tricky to describe, all fluffy. So, I tried to interrogate my feelings.

First, it was embarrassing that it broke. I’ve been there: you build a complex system, and forget about some lesser-known state. That’s why it’s important to invest in whatever it takes to shine a light on those states: quality assurance, automatic screenshotting, tests, and so on. Sometimes it’s simple hacks – like half of your team having scrollbars visible. And when you notice a bug, you try not to just fix it, but to rebuild it to be stronger (“leave the campsite in a better place you found it”) – be it by fixing the cause and not just the symptom, adding unit tests, changing practices, and so on.

But it also felt embarrassing how it broke. It feels clear there’s some manual calculation going on somewhere, and someone forgot to add this new change to it. One of the tricks I learned over time is that a well-designed system designs itself, but it takes effort and imagination to make a system resilient in this way. Here, if there was some abstraction of “adding stuff to the bottom,” then you wouldn’t have to worry about adding extra math. The system would take care of itself in many of these corner cases you will forget about.

I don’t want to shame (see, that word again!) individual people at Apple because I don’t know if it’s the lack of talent, or the whole system being wired in a way that doesn’t reward forward thinking or the kind of invisible work that needs to happen in those spaces. But the embarrassment should be there – if it doesn’t exist inside Apple, then that’s perhaps the sign of a real problem.