The Product-Minded Engineer

Chapter 3. Errors and Warnings

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 3rd chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

“PC Load Letter?” What the @#$! does that mean?

Michael Bolton

Staring at a malfunctioning printer, uttering this line, Michael Bolton from the 1999 movie Office Space skewered the technology industry for its poor error messages. In fairness to HP, the old LaserJet printers’ screens only had a limited number of display characters to work with. Today we have emerged from the stone age and have high-resolution screens to display more text. Think of all the words you can fit!

Consumers are regularly confronted with errors they don’t understand, and professional software engineers waste hours acting on confusing errors.

A fun error more specific to programming comes courtesy of the text markup system, LaTeX. LaTeX is a document typesetting language and system, useful for beautifully-rendered mathematical and scientific papers.

If you write this, wherein \\ tokens are newlines:

This is some text. \\ ...