New Horizons Developments the builder
New Horizons Developments the builder, and software for small food businesses running on Wix. Mostly this is the things that were expensive to find out — the failures that reported success, the APIs that lied, and the occasional decision worth explaining. Subscribe by RSS.
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A worse defect should be worth more to fix
The house's value was restored severity-scaled while a waiting buyer got a flat figure back, so the two disagreed in both directions.
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Billed three times, to the same second
One night's overheads charged three times over, all reporting the same balance afterwards. Opening a screen fires several requests at once.
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One query per house
The Builds screen fetched a row at a time and a company's houses were listed with a query each. Neither was slow enough to notice until it was.
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A ceiling that moves, and a market you softened yourself
A house listed at the highest price possible one day was above the maximum the next, with nothing on screen to explain it.
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The ceiling nobody had reached
Accepting an offer returned Internal Server Error. The player had £21,002,907 and there was a hard limit on the game at £21,474,836.47.
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The profit nobody was ever going to pay
Profit at this price was ask minus invested. It never sells for the ask. The label and the sum agreed with each other and both were wrong.
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One retry policy for two very different failures
No connection on one tab while the status bar kept updating, from a server answering every request in that window with a 200.
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Two constants, not flags
The simulation was configured with a spread of switches. Every combination was a different game, and most of them were not the one shipping.
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A site that arrives in a hundred and fifty years
Production was telling players a site came to market in 5,720 days. Forty game days, converted against one baseline and read back against another.
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Why the cheap builder costs more
Every firm has a price and a defect rate, and the cheap one is only cheap until somebody is standing in the hall looking at the render.