Just got to this error page by refreshing my Gmail tab, seeing the Gmail error page, and then refreshing the error page and getting this. Never seen this posted on the Internet before, but I thought it was interesting.
Source code isn’t written afresh every day. The point was the code was written at a different era and the current era wouldn’t produce this sort of code, and presumably you wouldn’t see anything but a generic 500. This is likely because product managers can’t stand free thought and action amongst engineers as it doesn’t appease their bean counter overlords sufficiently.
That’s pretty presumptuous, but especially so when there are comments parallel from googlers pinning the date and it’s easily determined by using this very powerful information retrieval tool called “Google.” Not to mention the possibility I work at Google, or that I wrote it myself!
Error page of the error page made me smile. Somehow, this makes total sense to me. Consider a reverse proxy where the origin is down and displaying the 'real' error page is not possible because of that. Alternatively, imagine a CloudFront function or Lambda experiencing the same issue, or encountering so many redirects that it interrupts and simply shows the error page of the error page. Nonetheless, I agree that you shouldn't see this issue very often.
I had this for a reverse proxy I developed that did some transformations. At about two critical points if there was an error there was literally nothing we could do except 500 barf.
Yeah unfortunately they are tricky to get rid of once you have them. In theory I can forward the email from one account to another, but in practice it's hard to think through all the weird security issues that might arise from doing so.
I've got one I made as a teen, a more professional sounding mature address, one for school, two for two separate google apps domains, and one for work. They pile up over time.
Have you never dealt with customers reporting errors?
Something went wrong is what they will tell you and expect an answer. Doesn’t matter how fancy and detailed the error, you will get back, “it’s broken fix it.”
Back in the early days of my career and supporting end users, I used to constantly get people say:
“xxx doesn’t work. I just get an error”
They would never tell me what the error message actually was. And when I asked, the reply often was
“I don’t remember. I’ve closed it now”.
It used to wind me up rotten. I can forget non-technical people not understanding the error message. But common sense should have kicked in that the error message is important to share with the person trying to fix said error.
Maybe all errors should be presented with a simple, distinctive and memorable theme - e.g. show a pig photo in that one maybe they'll remember "I got the pig error"
> Maybe all errors should be presented with a simple, distinctive and memorable theme - e.g. show a pig photo in that one maybe they'll remember "I got the pig error"
This sounds like the thing that they do in parking garages where each level will have a color, an image, or sometimes even a musical theme. (Which is to say, it sounds like a good idea!)
I was thinking celebrities, but then people will misidentify them.
Each micro-service (in 2025?!?!) would have different pictures of a particular celebrity, for different errors.. so if the user says e.g. "I see Taylor Swift doing..." the support can say "Let me forward you to the S3 people!".
You can dunk on lay people all you want, personally I'm a lot more furious about fellow programmers who thinks it's OK to show an error that says "file not found" without any context like the filename.
What would you expect? IME these are mostly unforeseen 500 errors, logged internally, and not something a client can do anything about (or should know anything about, for security reasons).
> If too many of these happen, someone will be paged. If you still see this after half an hour, send mail to xxxxxxxxxxx@google.com
(For curious folks working for Hooli, the magic number is 472481)