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
and gives you some headroom in improving performance since it's being choked by the excessive logging
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
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?
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.”
And for some reason printers seem to be the place where the spirits are strongest
I think you mean demons
The demons are attracted to doorways, passages between spaces, worlds, and realms. And printers are the ultimate doorway: a portal through which ideas and concepts can leave the software realm and enter the physical
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.
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
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.
Build caches are a bitch.
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.
MY PEOPLE!!! My code recently decided to not erase the flash when writing new firmware, bricking the device. Good times. (Old code || new code does not make for a working system)
I’m dealing with this right now. Making the largest embedded project for me (self taught) RP2040 in Cpp with a TFT touch screen, an IMU with fusion, a strip of “neopixels”, a 12v battery voltage reader, some Lemo connectors and custom cables, all in a 3D printed case in 3 parts. I’m so close to the end but still facing some code issues.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
._.
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