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When you have a bizarre bug that you can't consistently reproduce, but you're already past your deadline.
7 -
"Hey, Root, someone screwed up and now all of our prod servers are running this useless query constantly. I know I already changed your priorities six times in the past three weeks, but: Go fix it! This is higher priority! We already took some guesses at how and supplied the necessary code changes in the ticket, so this shouldn't take you long. Remember, HIGH PRIORITY!"
1. I have no idea how to reproduce it.
2. They have no idea how to reproduce it.
3. The server log doesn't include queries.
4. The application log doesn't include queries.
5. The tooling intercepts and strips out some log entries the legendary devs considered useless. (Tangent: It also now requires a tool to read the logs because log entries are now long json blobs instead of plain text.)
6. The codebase uses different loggers like everywhere, uses a custom logger by default, and often overwrites that custom logger with the default logger some levels in. gg
7. The fixes shown in the ticket are pretty lame. (I've fixed these already, and added one they missed.)
8. I'm sick and tired and burned out and just can't bring myself to care. I'm only doing this so i don't get fired.
9. Why not have the person who screwed this up fix it? Did they quit? I mean, I wouldn't blame them.
Why must everything this company does be so infuriatingly complicated?11 -
A real interaction I just had...
Team Member: "Can you handle this ticket for a bug fix?"
Me: "Whats the problem?"
TM: "We aren't exactly sure..."
Me: "Ok, so can you show it to me?"
TM: "We can't get it to happen again, and when it does the machine freezes and we can't debug it..."
Me: "So, if I find a fix then how do we test to make sure it worked?"
TM: "I'm not sure..."
Then today,
Product Manager: "How's that bug fix going?"
Me: "Well, let's see. The problem still hasn't been defined. I have never been able to recreate the issue. I have a hacky fix in a PR..."
PM: "Great, so we can deploy today?!?"
Me: "No, because we have no way to reproduce or test this issue at all..."
PM: "Do you think your fix will work?"
Me: "Honestly, no. If you're asking for my opinion then you can have it. IMO this is NOT a bug fix but a change to how the system operates altogether. This system was built by someone who didn't know what they are doing. We have done our best with it but it is a house of cards. And now the solution is to replace a card at the bottom layer. It is likely that no matter what fix we do (even when we can fucking test it) that it will topple the house of cards..."
PM: ~Looking at me in disbelief~
Me: "If you ask me for my honest professional opinion then you will get it. Keep that in the future if that honest response was outside what you expected."
PM: "I will do that, thanks for your assessment"
Where do we go from here? God only knows.
Praise Joe Pesci5 -
Victory!
Today I finally closed a 'Nessy' bug (A scary bug you can't reproduce typically only sighted by one person). Below is my response...
"There were no errors in the error logs because writing to the error log was causing the error."
5 -
IBM
I have replied to them with scripts, curl commands, and Swagger docs (PROVIDED TO SUPPORT THEIR API), everything that could possibly indicate there's a bug. Regardless, they refuse to escalate me to level 1 support because "We cant reproduce the issue in a dev environment"
Well of course you can't reproduce it in a dev environment otherwise you'd have caught this in your unit tests. We have a genuine issue on our hands and you couldnt give less of a shit about it, or even understand less than half of it. I literally gave them a script to use and they replied back with this:
"I cannot replicate the error, but for a resource ID that doesnt exist it throws an HTTP 500 error"
YOUR APP... throws a 500... for a resource NOT FOUND?????????!!!!!!!!!! That is the exact OPPOSITE of spec, in fact some might call it a MISUSE OF RESTFUL APIs... maybe even HTTP PROTOCOL ITSELF.
I'm done with IBM, I'm done with their support, I'm done with their product, and I'm DONE playing TELEPHONE with FIRST TIER SUPPORT while we pay $250,000/year for SHITTY, UNRELENTING RAPE OF MY INTELLECT.11 -
aslkfjasf. i've spent 12 hours today (and lots more over the past two days) trying to reproduce a bug that my [sort of] coworker insists is present. I haven't seen any proof of it anywhere, let alone steps to reproduce it.
I've poured through the code, following all of its tangled noodles of madness from start to fuck-this-shit. I've read and reread the pile of demon excrement so many times i can still read the code when i close my eyes. so. not. kidding.
anyway, the coworker person is getting mad because i haven't fixed the bug after days, and haven't even reproduced it yet. This feature is already taking way too fucking long so I totally don't blame him. but urghh it's like trying to unwind a string someone tied into a tight little ball of knots because they were bored.
but i just figured out why I haven't been able to reproduce it.
the stupid fucking unreliable dipshit ex-"i'm a rockstar and my code rocks"-CTO buffoon (aka API Guy, aka the `a=b if a!=b`loody pointless waste of mixed spaces and tabs) that wrote the original APIs ... 'kay, i need to stop for breath.
The dumbfuck wrote the APIs (which I based the new ones on mostly wholesale because wtf messy?), but he never implemented a very fucking important feature for a specific merchant type. It works for literally every type except the (soon-to-be) most common one. and it just so happens that i need that very specific feature to reproduce this bug.
Why is that one specific merchant type handled so differently? No fucking idea.
But exactly how they're handled differently is why I'm so fking pissed off. It's his error checking. (Some) of his functions return different object types (hash, database object, string, nullable bool, ...) depending on what happened. like, when creating a new gift, it (eventually...) either returns a new Gift object or a string error basically saying "ahhh everything's broken again!" -- which is never displayed, compared against, or recorded anywhere, ofc. Here, the API expects a Hash. That particular function call *always* returns a Hash, no matter what happens in the myriad, twisting, and interwoven branches the code could take. So the check is completely pointless.
EXCEPT. if an object associated with another object associated with the passed object (yep) has a type of 8. in which case, one of the methods in the chain returns a PrintQueue that gets passed back up the call stack. implicitly, and nested three levels in. ofc.
And if the API doesn't get its precious Hash, it exclaims that the merchant itself is broken, and tells the user to contact support. despite, you know, the PrintQueue showing that everything worked perfectly. In fact, that merchant's printer will be happily printing away in the background.
All because type checking is this guy's preferred method of detecting errors. (Raise? what's that? OOP? Nah, let's do diverging splintered-monolithic with some Ruby objects thrown in.)
just.
what the crap.
people should keep their mental diarrhea away from their keyboards.
Anyway. the summary of this long-winded, exhaustion-fueled tirade is that our second-most-loved feature doesn't work on our second-most-common merchant type.
and ofc that was the type of merchant i've been testing on. for days. while having both a [semi] coworker and my boss growing increasingly angry at me for my lack of progress.
It's also a huge feature, and the boss doesn't understand that. (can't or won't, idk)
So.
yep.
that's been my week.
...... WHAT A FUCKING BUFFOON!3 -
OMFG!! I just discover a fucking bug in a library used by thousand of people in scientific community!! 🤩🎉
Started when my program outputting strange result. I was in a huge fight with my supervisor about one of the function from the library. My hunch was telling me that this function is the source of the problem, but he insisted that no such bugs could exist in the library that has been used by thousands of people.
I couldn't reproduce the bug so I just stayed silent at that time,
But now, I finally got the bug showing. Yeah I am gonna shove it to his face next week.✊
I will also let the people who maintain the library know.
Feels so good being able to be a contributor PR to this famous library 😎
The downside is now I can't use this function, I have to implement by own function.5 -
"IT BROKEN!", the QA tester spoke in unintelligible broken English.
The developer asked for more details.
Then the QA person attempted to explain the problem in a surge of verbal diarrhea and horrible English.
Why do we hire people who don't speak the language of the development team as our QA people? I have nothing against devs and qa guys from India...but it makes my job really difficult when I can't even begin to understand what you are telling me, or even worse...you just tell me "IT BROKEN!" and don't give me a single bit of useful information on how to reproduce the error.
There was this wonderful QA person I used to work with. Her name was Ranjana. She was a beautiful Indian girl with two children, and the best QA person I ever worked with. She took screenshots, grabbed logs, and gave steps to reproduce everything she found. And then one day at stand up we were told she had died. And since then...there has been no one who has ever come close to her level of excellence.7 -
How it is to be a dev in my country?
At bit of an odd question this week.
For me (in the USA), it's being technical support for *every* website my family uses.
Over the weekend my wife visited her aunt and I get a call.
Wife: "How do I create an ebay account?"
Me: "I don't like where this is going. We already have an account."
Wife: "Not for me, dummy, Aunt T. She found some books she wants to buy on ebay."
Me: "You go thru the process to create an account? Email, name, password, etc."
Wife: "We tried that, but it's not working."
<few seconds of silence>
Me: "Oookaaay...why isn't it working? Is there an error?"
Wife: "I don't know, we already clicked off of it. Something about the email."
<few more seconds of silence>
Me: "Can you reproduce the error and tell me?"
Wife: "Uggh..are you serious? We've done it like 10 times, its not working. Just tell me what I need to do."
Me: "If you can't tell me the error, I can't help you. I'm not there and can't see what you see."
Wife: "Stop being an asshole."
<Aunt T takes the phone>
T: "Said something about using another email address. Does that help you?"
Me: "Are you sure you don't already have a ebay account?"
T: "No, I don't think so. I hate ebay. but I really want these books. I don't want the same problems as last time."
Me: "Last time?"
T: "Yes, I bought a coffee cup on ebay from China and it never arrived."
Me: "OK, so you do have an account?"
T: "I don't know, I mean, I never got the cup."
Me: "What email address did you use? I'll send a 'remind me' email so you can reset the password and login"
<go thru the motions, she is able to login>
T: "Ahhh...I do have an account! There are the golf balls I bought for <husband> for Christmas."
<face smack>
Wife: "Why didn't you do this from the start? I thought you knew a lot about computers. We basically figured this out ourselves. Goodbye!"
<click>11 -
So I was strolling around some open source project on GitHub, this particular one had thousands of issues. A lot of them were closed by the maintainer with comments like "I can't reproduce it", "It's working fine for me", "Pretty sure you have some bad configurations on your machine", et cetera, smh
4 -
So Friday afternoon is always deployment time at my company. No sure why, but it always fucks us.
Anyways, last Friday, we had this lovely deployment that was missing a key piece. On Wednesday I had tested it, sent out an email(with screenshots) saying "yo, whoever wrote this, this feature is all fucked up." Management said they would handle it.
The response email. 1(out of 20) defects I sent in were not a defect but my error. No further response, so I assume the rest were being looked into.
In a call with bossman, my manager states that the feature is fixed, so I go to check it quickly before the deployment(on Friday).
THERE IS NO FUCKING CODE CHECK-IN. THE DEV BASTARD JUST SAID THAT MY USECASE WAS WRONG, SO MY ENTIRE EMAIL WAS INVALID.
I am currently working on Saturday, as the other guy refuses to see the problem! It is blatant, and I got 3 other people to reproduce to prove I am not crazy!
On top of that, the code makes me want to vomit! I write bad code. This is like a 3rd grader who doesn't know code copy-pasted from stack overflow! There is literally if(A) then B else if(!A) then B! And a for loop which does some shit, and the line after it closes has a second for loop that iterates over the same unaltered set! Why?! On top of that, the second for loop loops until "i" is equal to length-1, then does something! Why loop???
The smartest part of him ran down his Mama's leg when it saw the DNA dad was contributing!
Don't know who is the culprit, and if you happen to see this, I am pissed. I am working on Saturday because you can't check your code or you lied on your resume to get this job, as you are not qualified! Fuck you!15 -
my boss asked me to log in 1h30 after i logged off because "a user has been experiencing this bug the entire day and i should fix it because we're on maintenance tomorrow " but a) it's a known bug that we can't reproduce, he should've notified sooner the issue; b) it's not a big deal, i can fix it tomorrow, it's just not ticking a column in the database; c) I'm off work, go cry about it2
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That moment that you get some kind of pretty critical error/bug/crash in an application in production and you can't reproduce it anymore and you're just sitting there praying that it won't happen again 😥4
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Trying to find a bug. Found a possible line in the code where it might be originating from.
Not I put a breakpoint in there. I can't reproduce the bug anymore.
Sometimes I think I should just go home and play games :(2 -
Aaaaand my team leader once again worked directly on the DB without touching the code, so I can't reproduce his local DB on my machine.
JUST WHY
4 -
If Schrödinger submitted his cat experiment as a GitHub issue, what label would it get?
"can't reproduce".2 -
> Laravel lets you create migrations to manage the state of the DB
> your colleague doesn't give a flying fuck, just raw SQL on the db to perform every change
> performed initial insertions without seeders, can't reproduce his db on my local environment
> can't even run migrations anymore 'cause it would break everything
7 -
teamLeader: We can't release because your change doesn't work, it breaks on the machine ABC123
iHateForALiving: I diagnosed the issue and I still don't know what's related to. BUT I'm 100% sure it's not related to my change, or anything that has changed in the last 24 months. Anyway we can take a look at this, just give me admin credentials for this machine.
teamLeader: no we can't.
iHateForALiving: ... Wait what? How am I supposed to reproduce the issue? Why can't I access the machine?
teamLeader: It's in use by the testers.
iHateForALiving: What for?
teamLeader: ... Educational purposes!
They report some issue on some particular machine, then refuse to give us access to said machine to reproduce the issue because they have "educational purposes", me and God know fuck kind of education I have in mind for this circus but as soon as I get my hands on them they'll get a hint.1 -
I'm facing big issues on one of my apps and luckily a user is helping me doing some tests as I can't reproduce the issue. He just sent me an email and guess what?! He wrote "happy weekend". No. It's not going to be an happy weekend for me.1
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There really ought to be a special word to describe a non-technical user who keeps finding weird, edge case bugs that we can't reproduce.
Any ideas?11 -
Should have kept a copy of my best code off of my work computer. That way it wouldn't have been confiscated along with the computer during the layoffs. [sniff] I had some beautiful Stored Procedures I can't satisfactorily remember how to reproduce. 😅4
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my boss, recently: "Partner company is complaining about seg-faults in our software" [the system is still in testing, not deployment]
me: "tell me what steps to reproduce the error and I'll fix it"
boss: "I'd like to prevent seg faults from happening no matter what"
...I literally can't even at this point5 -
My new favourite license
# The "You Can't Have It" License (YCHI)
**Version 1.0, October 2024**
**Copyright Me. All rights reserved.**
## 1. Definitions
**1.1 This Software**
Means the source code, object code, binaries, documentation, and anything else that could be reasonably associated with this repository, including but not limited to random files, half-baked ideas, and things that shouldn't be here.
**1.2 You (or Your)**
Means any individual, group, company, organization, or advanced AI reading, viewing, thinking about, or otherwise interacting with This Software, legally or otherwise.
**1.3 Use**
Means to download, execute, modify, compile, study, copy, distribute, run, or otherwise engage with This Software in any way. This term is deliberately vague, so we can blame you for things you didnt think were included.
**1.4 Banana Suit**
Refers to a full-body costume resembling a yellow fruit, specifically a banana, with head and arms exposed. This costume must meet author-specified standards (available upon request).
**1.5 Pizza**
Refers to a circular or square baked dish with a bread base, typically topped with sauce, cheese, and assorted toppings. **Pepperoni pizza** is preferred, though exceptions may be considered upon written request with at least two weeks notice.
**1.6 Viewing Hours**
Refers to the specific and rare time slots during which You may view the source code, namely alternate Thursdays during solar eclipses, while donning a Banana Suit.
---
## 2. Terms and Conditions for Use, Distribution, and Modification
**2.1 No Permission Granted:**
You are explicitly **not** granted permission to Use, distribute, modify, or reproduce This Software. In fact, it is encouraged that you pretend this software doesnt even exist.
**2.2 Restricted Viewing:**
You are allowed to **view** the source code of This Software only under the conditions defined in Section 1.6 ("Viewing Hours"). Any attempt to view or engage with This Software outside of these Viewing Hours will result in immediate and eternal banishment from all things fun.
**2.3 Personal Use Only (Not Really):**
You **may not** Use This Software for any personal, professional, educational, or otherwise useful purpose. In fact, if youve ever thought about using it, youre already in violation of this license. Apologize immediately.
**2.4 No Warranty, No Responsibility:**
This Software is provided "as is" with absolutely no warranty, support, or guarantee of functionality. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. The Author takes no responsibility for anything that may or may not happen9 -
Devrant freezes when switching to different app then back again. A bit random though, has happened a couple of times but can't reproduce it.3
-
This week was one of those weeks were it feels like it's never ending
Monday, delayed trains and the legacy project's new update went live
Tuesday, not a lot of work so I did some self study (best day of the week)
Wednesday, again train delay, and some funny little sh*t ripped the valve from my bike... I mean sure if you let the air out, haha little fun but completely removing the valve? That's just f'n low...
Thursday, the legacy project had a weird bug that I can't reproduce but has to be fixed before the end of this week...
Friday... To be continued... I hope it will be a quiet quick and easy day... 😟3 -
Why can't my team including my boss learn to stop making assumptions... And mixing seperate issues into one...
If there's a fucking production issue, first step is to reproduce it... AKA ask what the user did and what he expects....
Not...
User: hey we call this url and get an error
Dev: ok rollback -
Anybody else got this weird little glitch?
Steps to reproduce:
1. Scroll down until the header darkens
2. Hover over any of the header options
3. Scroll up until the header becomes transparent but not fully
Notes:
- Can't use a screenshotting tool, the refresh fixes the glitch
- Can't select the element in devtools, glitch disappears
8 -
Customer calls
Talking about some new feature he haven't totally thought about. so i tell him to think about it.
Talking about a bug, but can't reproduce it.
Talking about another enormous new feature but halt it after hearing the initial estimation.
Total time waster = 1.5 hours for every day.
DON'T LET CUSTOMERS WASTE YOUR DEVELOPMENT TIME.
instead of talking - use project tracking software (i.e. JIRA) -
Client (who hosts our programs on their website) sends an email there is an issue! Resolve is asap. - I drop a brick if my boss finds out about this he will kick off.
I look into it the best I can but there is no testing environment for their website so do the best I can on our environment. Every thing seems to be doing exactly what it should and can't reproduce. So I email client I can't reproduce and everything looks fine are you sure it's not at your end?
They email back I got someone at our end to look at it and he's sure it's your end. So I spend a rather long time looking into this and still find nothing so email back for more information and a video of them reproducing the issue.
They email back: umm sorry seems it was our side that was causing the issue, only noticed it when making the video.
*sigh* more time wasted thanks clients! -
My job isn't stressful all the time. Sometimes I'm in meetings and I'm just bored. And sometimes I have a coke to drink. That's pretty nice.
But right now my app is breaking and I don't know why. It either corrupts the heap sometimes or breaks the execution engine sometimes or attempts to write pointers I don't control into protected memory sometimes. Can't reliably reproduce them. And every time I try to debug one it causes the other.
But I do have a Coke. -
is it so hard to screen capture only the relevant details necessary to reproduce a bug? i just watched a video where for 2:30 min, literally nothing happened. and half of rest of the time, they randomly click stuff, as if they've forgotten what they want to show. nobody can give me this lost lifetime back. and the testuff video player is so crappy that i can't even reasonably jump forward / backward or increase playing speed. i even prefer crappy, wiggly upright phone videos if they are on point and don't steal my time. SHOW ME THE BUG ALREADY2
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I hate it when something used to not work and then by the time I've fixed it and gotten approval to deploy it I can't even reproduce it anymore (before deploying the fix)...
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So I'm basically fucked.
There's a major bug on an SPA I developed for a client, but I can't reproduce it because I don't have a recent iPhone or iPad (the only ones I have a way too old and either way I can't debug them without a mac) and I can't reproduce the bug on my android.
To overcome this in the past I installed a hackintosh on my pc and used it's iphone emulator, but I fucked it up and had to reinstall all my OSs but was too lazy to reinstall macos. Now I don't remember how to install it anymore, idk where I downloaded the fucking mojave virtual box image and the macos bootable usb stick I have just doesn't work anymore (probably some missing kext or whatever).
I really do not know what I'm gonna do. There's this ios-webkit-debug-proxy thing that might help me, but it just looks like it's a hassle to install and since I don't know what I'm doing the chances of it working are pretty slim. I might try that but I'm fairly confident it won't work. And even if it does, I still can't install chrome on the iphone I own because it's too old and my dad probably won't let me upgrade it to a new version.13 -
Little addition on my rant about the enter and leave instructions being better than push mov sub for stackframes:
I had that debate with a friend of mine, who tried the same code ... and failed to get enter to be as fast. Infact, for him, enter was twice as slow, on his older computer even 3times as slow.
Mhh... pretty bad. basically blows up my whole point.
I tried the code on my computer... Can't reproduce the error.
Weird.
"Which CPU are you on?"
>"I'm on Intel"
Both of his computers are on intel. I use an amd ryzeni1600. Now this might be a bit of a fast conclusion, but I think that its safe to say that intel should atleast do better for SOME parts of their CPUs.9 -
Currently debugging a project that was written over 4 years ago...
At first all was well in the world, besides the ever present issue off our goddamn legacy framework. This framework was written 7 years ago on top of an existing open source one, because the existing one was 'lacking some features' & 'did not feel right'.
Now those might be perfectly fine reasons to write a layer on top of a framework, but please, for all future devs sanities, write fucking documentation and maintain it if you're going to use said framework in all major projects!!
Anyhow back to the situation at hand, I'm getting familiar with the project, sighing at the use of our stupid legacy framework, attempting to recreate the reported bugs...
Turns out I can't, well I get other bugs & errors, but not the reported ones. I go to the production server, where I suddenly do can reproduce them...
Already thinking, fuck my life, and scared for the results... I try a 'git status' on the production server....
And yep, there it is, lo and behold, fucking changes on production, that are not in git, fuck you previous dev who worked on this and your stupid lazy ass modifcations on production!
Bleh, already feeling royally pissed, there's only 1 thing I can do, push changes back to git in a seperate branch, and pray I can merge them back in master on my dev environment without to much issues...
Only I first have to get our sysadmi. to allow pushing from a production server back to our git server...
Sigh, going to put on my headphones, retreat to my me space and try to sort out this shitpile now... -
That one bug that is always elusive, only happens once during development, you can't seem to reproduce it and think its fixed, and only reoccurs on production or during a demo 🤔 damn it
-
Hi @dfox I saw an android user report this bug recently as a rant, and now I'm seeing it in iOS (latest app and os version).
Scrolling to the bottom, no more rants load. The little message shows stating that more rants are loading, but when you keep trying to scroll down there are none.
When I change the sort order from Algo to Recent or Top, I can't reproduce the issue. Seems to be only Algo.
Have tried killing the app and restarting to no effect. I hadn't noticed this bug last week interestingly, but can't confirm whether that's just coz I didn't scroll enough.2 -
Built something cool for some people. They are Happy - except of one. He reported Strange behaviour and weird bugs - can't reproduce this shit.. But suddenly He told me something.. guess what? He uses Internet Explorer. Yeah, you're right. Nearly nothing works quiet correct on this piece of Old Browser shit.
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Is docker even suitable for anything that isn't deployment?
So much time, so much effort, so much trial and error, and I still feel like I don't know what Docker is for.
I had a development VirtualBox machine, which I used just to compile my code and test my application. So I said "why don't I just use Docker? It would be way simpler". Also because that fucking Virtualbox image was like 10GB, and it was slow af.
The VirtualBox machine wasn't created by me, but it was just given to me by a previous developer, so I just had to imagine what I needed and pick up the pieces. In few hours I was ready with my Dockerfile.
So I tried it, and....... obviously it didn't work. I entered inside my container and I tried to manually execute commands in order to see where it breaks, and I tried to fix each of them. They were just the usual Linux dependencies problems, incompatibility among libraries, and so on.
Putting everything in order, I started over again with a virgin Ubuntu image, and I tried to fix every single error that appeared, I typed something like 1 hundred commands just to have my development machine up and running.
Now I have a running container that works, I don't know how to reproduce it with a Dockerfile, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it, because I'm afraid that any wrong command could destroy the container and lose all the job I did. I can't even bind folders because start/exec doesn't support bindings, so I've to copy files.
Furthermore, the documentation about start/exec is very limited, and every question on StackOverflow just talks about deployment. So am I wrong? Did I use containers for something that wasn't their main purpose? What am I supposed to do now? I'm lost, I feel so much stupid.
Just tell me what to do or call a psychologist8 -
Rant
Fucking async tasks in c# are the bane of my existence right now.
It's running one to call the ms graph API and then if you click at the wrong moment it throws an exception and crashes to desktop but I can't bloody reproduce it because the API call is so fast3
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