Prove your assumptions, but remember Murphy was an optimist

Continuing on my unremarkable coding task, having gotten it to work, it was now time to clean up the code.

Given the large load expected, I couldn't allocate a new direct ByteBuffer for every piece of data I wanted to handle. But code that accepts a ByteBuffer is equivalent to code that accepts a byte array, a starting offset and a length (or a limit), right? So I just set the position and the limit on the boundaries of the data and I'm good to go.

Now I ran into some of my own previous assumptions. Luckily, the failure resulted in a log message that made it clear where something was going wrong. It was one of those places where a deviation from the happy path either cannot happen, should not happen or we didn't really care too much. A place where I used to code an empty block "{}", or when I was feeling diligent, with a comment "{/*cannot happen*/}". Now I'll code it as "{throw new AssertionError("Cannot happen.");}" or at least "{LOG.fine("Don't care.");}".

Anyway, a quick analysis showed a likely cause. I say likely, because it's an assumption until proven. I wrote a quick unit test that failed, fixed the code and the test passed. But the program still failed, with the same log message as before. Imagine what I might have been doing if I hadn't proven the failure and the fix with the unit test, I'd still be staring at the same place and possibly ripping my code to shreds in desperation. Now I could immediately move on and fix the second error.

OK, on a roll now, all assumptions proven by assertions, I'm just about done. Except that the code still doesn't work and no sign of why. Murphy's law in full action.

Finally I find it. There's a trap in ExecutorService. What's the difference between calling "execute(Runnable)" versus "submit(Runnable)"? Nothing much, when the code works. But "submit(Runnable)" should have a big red warning sticker. It returns a Future, with no result. You don't bother to "get()" nothing. The devastating side-effect is that all exceptions get preserved until "get()" is called, so this is a hidden equivalent of "catch(Exception e){}". Next task: change this everywhere and add a rule to FindBugs.