Silence

I tend to post pictures to the blog here fairly often. I pretty much always carry a camera with me, and so I usually have a photograph to post, either by itself, or to illustrate a post.

But today, for some reason, Blogger is not allowing me to upload from my computer. These things happen, so it wouldn't be a big deal, except for one problem: there's no error message. The picture simply isn't displayed. This sort of occurrence, "failing silently," makes things difficult for users because it's hard to troubleshoot. After all, there's no information about what may have gone wrong that can be searched on the Internet or noted in a support ticket.

And I've noticed similar problems in Android; sometimes, an application simply fails to launch, and no explanation is given for why. I'm given to understand that this is poor programming practice, and so I wonder a bit why Google, of all companies, isn't better about it. After all, being unable to complete a task and having no idea why makes for a very poor customer experience.

Of course, the problem may not be on Google's end, which complicates matters. Perhaps an update to a browser extension, or some other software, is causing the problem, and there's no error message because Google isn't even aware that there's been a failure on Blogger's part.

This is the thing about modern computing... there are so many parts, and so many vendors, that the number of possible causes is astronomical. And that's not something that's going to change anytime soon.