1y ago

I swear I didn’t change anything

78 comments

Rule 9 from Agans's Debugging: If you didn't fix it, it ain't fixed
Intermittent problems are the worst...
- The problem is, how do you fix it if you can't make it break?
  The worst thing is when somebody comes to you saying "yeah, I had this problem yesterday, but it's working now".
  
  this is a case for excessive logging man
  likely won't help you actually fix the issue because miraculously you didn't log the three variables you actually need but it'll make you feel better in the meantime
  
  You should have a unit test you can run until failure

ngl my programming career helped me stay grounded in reality. Every impossible issue turned out to always have a cause, a reason to be there. Could have taken weeks to track down the issue, but there was always a cause.
But still.. every 3 or so years.. something actually impossible pops-up. Impossible to fix, impossible to reproduce, and suddenly gone from existence, as if it was never there.
- Cosmic radiation! Bit flips! Quantum tunneling! Who TF knows...
  
  If only consumer hardware had ECC memory
  
  It ran outta gas. It had a flat tire. It didn't have enough money for cab fare. Its tux didn't come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from outta town. Someone stole its car. There was an earthquake, a terrible flood, locusts!
- Given how software is a giant Jenga tower made of smaller Jenga towers it's amazing any of it works at all
  
  Well at least some of the Jenga towers have redundant Jenga tower replicas, and that Jenga tower over there has a bunch of other Jenga towers ready to be propped up by a PAASser-by given a small cold start penalty. And this one? Nobody knows how it works, but it always worked.
  Right? ... Right?
  
  Relavent article: How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code
- Yeah. First instinct in this case makes me think somebody that owns a product upstream saw a failure log and fixed the issue (I'd still want to confirm that, though)

The longer I’m in IT, the more I realize that the adeptus mechanicus might be on to something with beseeching the machine spirit.
- A lot of people think I'm joking when I say I'm a good at what I do because I'm a witch doctor with computers. Software Engineering requires experience with the occult, at a minimum.
  
  “In my professional opinion, this network is haunted.”
  …haunted?
  (Points to various certifications) “HAUNTED.”
  
  In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.

The other day I launched an old game and got met with an error, something about directX9 and missing a redistributable file or something. Decided not to fuck with it.
Yesterday I launched it again to take a closer look at the error message to see if I could fix it. No error message, game booted without issues.
My confusion.
- Did you reboot your PC after installing? Games often included DirectX redistributables which required a reboot to fully install.
- Don't forget them cosmic rays flipping bits in your memory.
- It got scared and decided to fix itself.

 undefined

    
if (new Date().getDay() % 2) {
    runCode();
}

I have this issue once in a while with PowerShell.
The environment gets f'up as you develop. You get strange shit happening or it blows up.
Restart PowerShell or reboot and it's all good
- I also want to know

lucky, you have code gnomes. leave out an offering of mountain dew and pizza rolls to appease the spirits.

Still better than my Go experience 2 years ago.
fails when deployed, after adding debug statements looks like in one structure there's 2 instead of 1, and looking at the code that should be impossible. Issue happens every single time.
the same exact unmodified container when downloaded and run locally works correctly every time.

Build caches are a removed.

I had that happen with embedded programming when you forget to flush the eeprom after changing your saved values.
- hmm embedded. Beautifuly memories from uni. One lab my team forgot to remove a register whose supposed purpose was only enabling a communications bus (documentation didn't mention it doing anything else). Turns out that same register disables the dac which we needed for the new excersise. You learn to love the hardware datasheets real quick.
  
  And when the data sheet is wrong that gets fun. You start parsing I2S for each bit and record the result until you see a pattern. Or when your program crashes the USB and you can’t reupload without hitting boot or reset but they are inside the box.
- I know some of these words
  
  On small computers like Arduino there is a very small memory called eeprom that stays when powered off. It saves ultra low level data (at the bit and byte level) if you don’t “format” after changing what is being saved where it then tries to read gibberish and things go bonk.

Cosmic radiation could always wreak havock by simply switching a 0 to a 1. It appears The Universe is Hostile to Computers.

Maybe it only works on even dates, which is, you know, perfectly normal.

In university, we had to complete weekly tasks. A few times, the validation script provided by my professor returned an error, meaning that my solution had a mistake. When I tried rerunning the script the following day, my answer was accepted. At the end of the last lecture, my professor came to me and told me that I was usually the first one to hand in a solution and that he sometimes used my answers to validate his results.

So... Network issue. I'm not falling for those ever again.
- As a network engineer, I hate you. Everyone blames network, even when the program/code/script/etc is the only thing that won't work on it.

I've recently had the opposite: code worked then the next day without anything changing it didn't.
Turned out the J-Link programmer always needs the license check to work, but that expires every day at midnight. It only prompts again if you choose the app and restart it. So I couldn't get my debugger to work and spent hours trying to figure it out until I did the best thing. I turned it off and on again.

just make sure you absolutely don't comment or document it then commit it to git with a cryptic commit message and even more cryptic author name and then hand it off to your coworkers
- AAA why do people do that, like wtf you spent so much time fixing this, ATLEAST MAKE IT CLEAR WHAT YOU DID
  
  searching google and finding a ten year old stackoverflow post with your exact problem but the answer is just "nevermind i figured it out"

I had a bug in unity once where my project just stopped working. I hadn't changed anything, but I could no longer compile it or run the game in editor. I looked up the issue and apparently unity has/had a long-standing bug where the engine would rarely just quit being able to compile your scripts. The only solution was to make a new project and reimport all your assets, scripts, scenes, etc. Dunno if they ever figured out what was causing it or if it just kinda resolved itself and stopped showing up at some point. I don't really use unity much anymore.

Code works
Ctrl+a, ctrl+x, ctrl+v
Code doest work

As a full stack cloud dev usually for me it ends up being some lag between when Azure claims a thing was updated and when it actually was.
(shout out to azure B2C custom policies for taking like 10 minutes to actually reflect changes despite giving me a lil green checkmark)

Reminds me of the time I couldn't get my code to compile due to invisible unicode characters in the code I copy-pasted from the web.
- Kinda related, I always copy paste into a "simple" text editor before I copy paste into something else. Slack is so bad about having hidden characters I don't even want to think what other sites/programs do.
  
  Do you know if Ctrl+shift+v is good enough? (Paste as plain text)

Did you include an odd day of the month exception?
- My bug only occurs on the March 1st after a leap day but only if the year is divisible by 100

It do be like that sometimes... haha
- Typically happens to me in the initial moments before I remember it's been a week since I've pulled master.

Setting up a stack of mongo db and unifi network application in docker compose
Doesnt work
Takes stack down, turns a setting off and on, starts the compose
Suddenly starts working
._.
- The UniFi controller software has always been a garbage java project. It feels a bit better these days though.
  
  Thing is I am a complete novice, set it up correctly but was duped by a bug.
  Because I didn't know better I hunted ghosts until I found the one special and specific github issue tipping me off about the setting.

Must've been the effective_date.

reminds me (tho it's inverse) old Visual Studio and how it liked to completely fuck up the solution to the point of being unable to fucking build the program.