Softropix Lab

Code, mistakes and what lies between them.

Write-ups of problems met in real work: what broke, why it went unnoticed and what fixes it.

No retelling of the documentation. Each write-up covers one case, carried through to a test on a live system.

Write-ups

What is already taken apart

Write-ups: 03

01

XML

How one character breaks a Windows installation

An ampersand in the answer file makes it invalid. The installer says nothing, and the person cannot work out why none of it was applied.

02

Flask

The secret key that sat in the code

A fallback value in os.environ.get looks convenient until it turns out the production server is running on exactly that.

03

S3

How to hand out files of five gigabytes

Google Drive serves a stub instead of the file, the browser will not pull a download through the panel, and somebody pays for the traffic.