Talking about IRC days with someone, and I mentioned the bot I wrote (since migrated to slack.) I gave a talk about how she works at Strange Loop a few years back:

https://where.coraline.codes/talks/alice/ 

I gave that talk a few times… don’t remember if Alice had started spontaneously speaking Dutch before or after the Strange Loop recording.

This was, by far, my favorite bug of my entire career.

Speaking in Dutch wasn’t a consistent thing either. Her triggered responses (!commands) all worked as expected. If you asked her a question (NLP), though… you got an answer in Danish.

So when you ask Alice a freeform question, like

“Seriously, Alice, what is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?”

She responds correctly.

Only, out of the blue, with no recent deploys or config changes, with no explanation that I could think of, during the reign of this bug she would have answered this way instead:

“I sidste ende konkluderes det, at lufthastighedshastigheden…”

This wasn’t the first time that Alice surprised me, of course. She’s a very complex system with tons of moving parts. She connects to about a dozen external APIs, including Google’s NLP SaaS. Strange emergent behavior is natural in complex systems.

(Especially complex systems that evolved from greetbots over a period of 10 years of side project status.)

So Alice is quirky to begin with.

But this whole Danish thing? I couldn’t conceive of a bug in my code that would possibly explain translation.

In fact, there was no bug in the code. I was thinking about Alice as a program, rather than as a network of programs. All those APIs she’s wired up to are just as critical to the way she works as any class or module I may have written.

So to solve the problem, I had to consider Alice as part of an ecosystem.

This bug taught me very important lessons about microservices. And how to start looking for root causes of aberrant emergent behavior in service ecosystems.

Do you have a theory as to what caused Alice to start speaking Danish?

Share it here. Tomorrow I’ll pick my favorite and send the winner an envelope full of stickers, including the rare and now retired Code Witch sticker.