Breaking things with a fake goal for API tinkering

[tehcrash]

So, I made a fake goal for tinkering with the API apitinkeringdomore, intended to never derail by requiring 1 unit per year, with an extra saftey buffer of 99999999999 days (or however many nines the field let me enter), and logging a datapoint with 999999 events.

It looks like that breaks things.

The Goal:

The Dashboard:

and the Gallery:

Note that the goal error is also displaying the character literals \n instead of newlines…

I would assume that what happened was the large number of safe days overflowed whatever datatype your parse the field into.

[dreev]

Beautiful bug report; thank you!

For prioritizing purposes, were you able to work around it ok for your api test goal? Easier way to get a goal with no risk of derailing is to dial the road to a rate of zero.

Sort of related:

"Rate cannot be 0"

These counterarguments are excellent but I still think there’s a lot to be said for hard nudges and opinionated software. It used to be horribly common for newbees to set the initial slope to zero for lack of having thought of something better. Then Beeminder would just never make them do anything and all the mustering of willpower that made them set up the goal was wasted. Or, worse, they’d not understand anything about setting slopes of yellow brick roads and such and Beeminder would just seem…

[tehcrash]

Yep, support reset something or other, and the tinkering “goal” works as expected.