Black Magic
You wouldn’t think that we software engineers would be at all superstitious. Software is the most transparent entity you could possibly work with—if you ever want to know why it’s behaving as it is, everything you could ever need to work it out is in the source code.
Nevertheless, many projects seem to have their own little bits of black magic:
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“Yeah—for some reason builds created on that server always show that bug. Dunno why, just make sure that you always take the build from that other server instead.”
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“Oh, you’re getting that error. You need to make sure that you start things in the right order. It shouldn’t make a difference, but for some reason it does.”
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“Yup, the first time always fails, but after that it always works ...
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