There is a spider outside my window at work that I've named Vanessa. She is a web developer. And every time I squash a bug, I feed it to her.

Every time you squash a bug before someone else even sees it...

Lead: "There's a bug, you fix"
Me: "The PR for that has been waiting for your review since yesterday..."

Chasing a bug down in CSS, fuckity fuck fuck.

I will find you, and I will squash you.

I just had a dream about how to squash a bug I was encountering in my app. I immediately woke up, fixed the bug, and cleaned up my code. I thought this only happened in movies.

"Me getting ready to squash the bug" vs
"Me after fixing the bug caused by my own stupidity"

Programmer’s life cycle:
- Nothing can stop me today
- A bug huh? let's squash
- I can’t fix this
- Confidence crisis
- Questions career
- Questions life
- Oh it was a typo
- Nothing can stop me today

Today I learned why it’s so important to have life outside engineering (better put, I remembered this).

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been working hard to catch some deadlines, contributing to a large oss project. Getting up at 4am, working with the team in my timezone, having some time with family then working with people with 6-9 hour difference was extremelly challenging and I was so tired I literaly was a fucking pain to bear with.

Today, on Saturday, my wife started cleaning the bathroom sink drain. You know, started... “won’t fix” was not an option. First, the dirt and the smell, mmmmmm, you just have to love it. And then the thing collapses (yes, I was optimistic, trying to clean it just partly - I learned not to fix if it aint’t broken, I wonder where).

It’s of course built of trivial parts, but the water just finds its way. Needless to say, I am afraid of it :). In the end, it got resolved. Just as any bug we squash - with some anger and plenty of dirty words.

During the whole thing, I thought to myself, that all that stress at work is quite bearable; it put everything back into a perspective. Great feeling!

So this just happened,

Me and my co-worker (we are junior developers) were working on the same bug, it was a post call throwing a server exception.

We had asked for help to debug this issue from a senior developer the day before, he was quite busy with his own tasks.

He is one those kinds who would keep working even if the entire bay is wasting their time, always keeping to himself, needless to say I haven't seen him smile.

Back to my story, he couldn't spare time yesterday so we tried to squash the bug ourselves thinking he might have forgotten we had called him.He then comes out of nowhere, he firsr checks the button bindings, params sent and the call being made.

He then went through the backend code strategically placing the break points, clicks and debugs a few times and then opens the console. BAM!!!!

" D' hell yo !!" Shows up in the console, not just once but multiple times. Turns out I forgot the logger I had placed in the catch block.

He turns to me in super slo-mo looks me in the eye and whispers "what the hell yo!" and kept quite for some time, meanwhile the sense of cringe was slowly creeping on me. That was when he let out a loud blurt and the entire cabin turned to us. Needless to say it was awkward.

His smile was creepy though :/

When a bug was much easier to squash than expected! Excellent!

>Sitting at desk pondering over what is wrong with code.

:Top

BRAIN : "maybe we will think better with /another/ cup of cofee?"

Repeat until

BRAIN : "damn now im too jittery to think about code. Maybe if I relax woth some music/meme hunting ill be able to focus"

Repeat until

BRAIN : "Damnit i spent 2 hours on 9gag and not coding. Gotta get back to this bug squashing but im now so tired. Maybe some cofee will help me think"

Goto Top

Proudest bug squash? Probably the time I fixed a few bugs by accident when I was just trying to clean up an ex-coworker's messy code.

So I used to work with a guy who was not a very good programmer. It's hard to explain exactly why other than to say that he never really grew out of the college mindset. He never really learned the importance of critical thinking and problem-solving. He did everything "by the book" to a point where if he ran into an issue that had no textbook solution, he would spin his wheels for weeks while constantly lying to us about his progress until one of us would finally notice and take the problem off his plate. His code was technically functional, but still very bad.

Quick Background: Our team is responsible for deploying and maintaining cloud resources in AWS and Azure. We do this with Terraform, a domain-specific language that lets us define all our infrastructure as code and automate everything.

After he left, I took on the work to modify some of the Terraform code he'd written. In the process, I discovered what I like to call "The Übervariable", a map of at least 80 items, many of them completely unrelated to each other, which were all referenced exactly once in his code and never modified. Basically it was a dynamic collection variable holding 80+ constants. Some of these constants were only used in mathematical expressions with multiple other constants from the same data structure, resulting in a new value that would also be a constant. Some of the constants were identical values that could never possibly differ, but were still stored as separate values in the map.

After I made the modification I was supposed to make, I decided I was so bothered by his shitty code that I would spend some extra time fixing and optimizing it. The end result: one week of work, 800 lines of code deleted, 30 lines added, and a massive increase in efficiency. I deleted the Übervariable and hardcoded most of the values it contained since there was no possible reason for any of them to change in the future. In the process, I accidentally fixed three bugs that had been printing ominous-sounding warnings to the console whenever the code was run.

I have a lot of stories about this guy. I should post some more of them eventually.

Proudest bug squash experience?

Fixed a N+1 pattern bug on our web site. Wasn't a deeply technical problem, but I was proud to shove the fix up the arse of the developer who blamed me (and even got a VP involved) for the web site crashes (the N+1 involved his code calling a service I wrote) and none of the half-dozen other devs found it.
I really wanted to make a t-shirt with his initial 'blame' email outlining all the 'technical problems' with my service, and the fix was literally moving the service call outside 5 (yes 5) level deep for..each loops.

Just had a bug reported that only happens in Chrome. Works in IE and Safari. This is going to be an impossible bug to squash.

Have been pissed at the guy who wrote the js on the project im working on (its just so messy!). Same project has python scripts I need to look at to squash a bug, and this. code. is. so. clean. They should have let this guy write everything in python. Im ashamed I ever hated on him.

The last one and only one I joined was online and called “flex bug squash”.
It was about ~8-9 years ago.

I won Flex Builder desktop software license and I was using it after so I think it was cool.

Fun, creative times it was.

That was also first and last significant thing I won and then Steve killed flash on mobile and as a result killed flash.

Thanks Steve if you’re reading this.

A: oh hey my commit is not in the master branch...
A: *seeing bunch of commit deleted activity in bitbucket by B
A: Lol B deleted commits in master branch
B: Wait, what?! I know I have rebased my branch.. but never have I rebased anything in the master branch.. how can this be *intense breathing
B: Are you sure you have pushed yours to master?
A: Sure I've rebased, squashed, and rbt landed my work to master, here look my local master has my commit
CTO: wait what? Is this related to this bug we have in production just now? Please don't panic, let us resolve it

Turns out rbt land just squash your commit to your local master branch and they thus A have not pushed it to the remote. And the bunch of commit deleted activity were bitbucket not informing from which branch the activity was happening. Almost gave us heart attack.

"The Perils and Triumphs of Debugging: A Developer's Odyssey"

You know you're in for an adventurous coding session when you decide to dive headfirst into debugging. It's like setting sail on the tumultuous seas of code, not quite sure if you'll end up on the shores of success or stranded on the island of endless errors.

As a developer, I often find myself in this perilous predicament, armed with my trusty text editor and a cup of coffee, ready to conquer the bugs lurking in the shadows. The first line of code looks innocent enough, but little did I know that it was the calm before the storm.

The journey begins with that one cryptic error message that might as well be written in an ancient, forgotten language. It's a puzzle, a riddle, and a test of patience all rolled into one. You read it, re-read it, and then call over your colleague, hoping they possess the magical incantation to decipher it. Alas, they're just as clueless.

With each debugging attempt, you explore uncharted territories of your codebase, and every line feels like a step into the abyss. You question your life choices and wonder why you didn't become a chef instead. But then, as you unravel one issue, two more pop up like hydra heads. The sense of despair is palpable.

But, my fellow developers, there's a silver lining in this chaotic journey. The moment when you finally squash that bug is an unparalleled triumph. It's the victory music after a challenging boss fight, the "Eureka!" moment that echoes through the office, and the affirmation that, yes, you can tame this unruly beast we call code.

So, the next time you find yourself knee-deep in debugging hell, remember that you're not alone. We've all been there, and we've all emerged stronger, wiser, and maybe just a little crazier. Debugging is our odyssey, and every error is a dragon to be slain. Embrace the chaos, and may your code be ever bug-free!