Spending whole day debugging one error. Fixed it in 10 minutes on the next day. Anyone else ?

So I told my wife one week ago: "Yeah, you should totally learn to code as well!"

Yesterday a package arrived, containing a really beautiful hardcover book bound in leather, with a gold foil image of a snake debossed into the cover, with the text "In the face of ambiguity -- Refuse the temptation to guess" on it.

Well, OK, that's weird.

My wife snatches it and says: "I had that custom made by a book binder". I flip through it. It contains the Python 3.9 language reference, and the PEP 8 styleguide.

While I usually dislike paper dev books because they become outdated over time, I'm perplexed by this one, because of how much effort and craftsmanship went in to it. I'm even a little jealous.

So, this morning I was putting dishes into the dishwasher, and she says: "Please let me do that". I ask: "Am I doing anything wrong?"

Wife responds: "Well, it's not necessarily wrong, I mean, it works, doesn't it? But your methods aren't very pythonic. Your conventions aren't elegant at all". I don't think I've heard anyone say the word "pythonic" to me in over a decade.

And just now my wife was looking over my shoulder as I was debugging some lower level Rust code filled with network buffers and hex literals, and she says: "Pffffff unbelievable, I thought you were a senior developer. That code is really bad, there are way too many abbreviated things. Readability counts! I bet if you used Python, your code would actually work!"

I think I might have released something really evil upon the world.

sudo apt-get random-tool

Traceback (most recent call last):

Aborting because there's a fork in the spoon compartment on line 43 in main

Error this script only works on Python 2.7 and maybe 4.1 on line 59 in main

Missing symbols when trying to decipher Sumerian recipe for steamed vegetables on line 67 in main

Cannot open shared object: Your OS is a bully and is hiding my files on line 98 in main

Are you sure all directories matching ^(/)?([^/\0]+(/)?)+$ are in your $PATH on line 268 in main

Your computer is kind of vibrating in an annoying way on line 332 in main

Failing because I'm feeling insecure please hold me on line 587 in main

I'm feeling confused about my sentience when running TensorFlow models on line 682 in main

FUCK

HAS ANYONE EVER MANAGED TO JUST FUCKING INSTALL A PYTHON BASED APPLICATION WITHOUT DEBUGGING RANDOM COMPUTER STATE SHIT AND DEPENDENCIES FOR THREE HOURS?

Everyone has a duck, meanwhile im using this.

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

I was on vacation when my employer’s new fiscal year started. My manager let me take vacation because it’s not like anything critical was going to happen. Well, joke was on us because we didn’t foresee the stupidity of others…

I had to update a few product codes in the website’s web config and deploy those changes. I was only going to be logged in for 30 minutes to complete that.

I get messaged by one of our database admins. He was doing testing and was unable to complete a payment on the website. That was strange. There was a change pushed by our offsite dev agency, but that was all frontend changes (just updating text) and wouldn’t affect payments.

We don’t want to enlist the dev agency for debugging work, especially when it’s not likely that it’s a code issue. But I was on vacation and I couldn’t stay online past the time I had budgeted for. So my employer enlists the dev agency for help. It’s going to be costly because the agency is in Lithuania, it was past their business hours, and it was emergency support.

Dev agency looks at error logs. There are Apple Pay errors, but that doesn’t explain why non Apple Pay transactions aren’t going through. They roll back my deployment and theirs, but no change. They tell my employer to contact our payment processor.

My manager and the Product Manager contact Payroll, who is the stakeholder for our payment gateways. Payroll contacts our payment gateway and finds out a service called Decision Manager was recently configured for our account. Decision Manager was declining all payments. Payroll was not the person who had Decision Manager installed and our account using this service was news to her.

Payroll works with our payment processor to get payments working again. The damage is pretty severe. Online payments were down for at least 12 hours. Our call center had logged reports from customers the night before.

At our post mortem, we had to find out who ok’d Decision Manager without telling anyone. Luckily, it was quick work. The first stakeholder up was for the Fundraising Dept. She said it wasn’t her or anyone on her team. Our VP of Analytics broke it to her that our payment processor gave us the name of the person who ok’d Decision Manager and it was someone on the Fundraising team. Fundraising then starts backtracking and says that oh yes she knew about it but transactions were still working after the Decision Manager had been configured. WTAF.

Everyone is dumbfounded by this. How could you make a big change to our payment processor and not tell anyone? How did our payment processor allow you to make this change when you’re not the account admin (you’re just a user)?

Our company head had to give an awkward speech about communication and how it’s important. The web team can’t figure out issues if you don’t tell us what you did. The company head was pissed because it was a shitty way to start off the new fiscal year. Our bill for the dev agency must have been over $1000 for debugging work that wasn’t helpful.

Amazingly, no one was fired.

Ok friends let's try to compile Flownet2 with Torch. It's made by NVIDIA themselves so there won't be any problem at all with dependencies right?????? /s

Let's use Deep Learning AMI with a K80 on AWS, totally updated and ready to go super great always works with everything else.

> CUDA error
> CuDNN version mismatch
> CUDA versions overwrite
> Library paths not updated ever
> Torch 0.4.1 doesn't work so have to go back to Torch 0.4
> Flownet doesn't compile, get bunch of CUDA errors piece of shit code
> online forums have lots of questions and 0 answers
> Decide to skip straight to vid2vid
> More cuda errors
> Can't compile the fucking 2d kernel
> Through some act of God reinstalling cuda and CuDNN, manage to finally compile Flownet2
> Try running
> "Kernel image" error
> excusemewhatthefuck.jpg
> Try without a label map because fuck it the instructions and flags they gave are basically guaranteed not to work, it's fucking Nvidia amirite
> Enormous fucking CUDA error and Torch error, makes no sense, online no one agrees and 0 answers again
> Try again but this time on a clean machine
> Still no go
> Last resort, use the docker image they themselves provided of flownet
> Same fucking error
> While in the process of debugging, realize my training image set is also bound to have bad results because "directly concatenating" images together as they claim in the paper actually has horrible results, and the network doesn't accept 6 channel input no matter what, so the only way to get around this is to make 2 images (3 * 2 = 6 quick maths)
> Fix my training data, fuck Nvidia dude who gave me wrong info
> Try again
> Same fucking errors
> Doesn't give nay helpful information, just spits out a bunch of fucking memory addresses and long function names from the CUDA core
> Try reinstalling and then making a basic torch network, works perfectly fine
> FINALLY.png
> Setup vid2vid and flownet again
> SAME FUCKING ERROR

> Try to build the entire network in tensorflow
> CUDA error
> CuDNN version mismatch
> Doesn't work with TF
> HAVE TO FUCKING DOWNGEADE DRIVERS TOO
> TF doesn't support latest cuda because no one in the ML community can be bothered to support anything other than their own machine
> After setting up everything again, realize have no space left on 75gb machine
> Try torch again, hoping that the entire change will fix things

At this point I'll leave a space so you can try to guess what happened next before seeing the result.

Ready?

3

2

1

> SAME FUCKING ERROR

In conclusion, NVIDIA is a fucking piece of shit that can't make their own libraries compatible with themselves, and can't be fucked to write instructions that actually work.

If anyone has vid2vid working or has gotten around the kernel image error for AWS K80s please throw me a lifeline, in exchange you can have my soul or what little is left of it

I was supporting a legacy CRM app which front end used Visual Basic 6 and almost the entire business logic was written on SQL store procedures.

A "feature" of the product was the open code, anyone with admin access could modify forms, code and store procedures.

We also sold "official" (and expensive) consulting services to modify the code.

A long time customer owned this thing and it was heavily customized. They had hired us to change something, hired a third party to make other changes and decided to modify some stuff themselves because, why not?

Suddenly they came to product support asking to fix a bug. The problem happened on a non customized form.

After reviewing, I realized the form used several of the modified store procedures in the business layer. I tried saying we don't support custom code but my boss was being pushed and said "look into it"

All 3 parties denied responsibility and said their changes were NOT the problem (of course). Neither of them commented or documented their changes.

The customer started to threaten to sue us.

I spent 5 full days following every field on the form through the nested and recurrent SQL store procedures and turns out it was a very simple error. A failed insert statement.

I was puzzled of why the thing didn't throw any error even while debugging. Turns out in SQL 2003 (this was a while ago) someone used a print line statement and SQL stopped throwing errors to the console. I can only assume "printing" in SQL empties the buffered error which would be shown in the console.

I removed the print statement and the error showed up, we fixed it and didn't get sued
:)

To me, it seems like the rise of distributed systems like mesos / kubernetes combined with Docker require you to be master sysadmin, veteran kernel hacker and a part time c developer ALL AT ONCE if you really want to shave off time from debugging/ performance tuning sessions. Anyone wish they paid more attention in class ? Lol.

Anyone else developed a habit to structure verbal allday Argumentations in your head in Code syntax? Helps me alot to follow ones logic. Except when I'm arguing with my girlfriend. Sometimes setMood(angry) gets randomly called (bug?) and then every if statement seems to be valid, eventhough it should return false. An inputstream that contains my outputstream is initialized but .readLine() is never being called. Instead, the outputstream to my inputstream is being overly abused. Once we get dive deeper into our if-statement we will find a while loop with a mysterious flag. Noone knows it's origin. The while loop keeps printing out random concatenated strings until it overflows your own capacity. I would have said its while(true) but in fact there must be a timer in another very hidden thread or something that sets our flag to false. The other and only way I know to exit that loop is to call apology() 100 times (maybe a variable sets the boolean that could be deeply buried in her projectstructure like this CONST.VALUES.getMood().getRealMood().getTrueMood().TRUTHCONTAINER.angryMode=true)..
I wish I could get a stressball so I can continue theorycrafting and debugging. Its 4.30 am now, my better side is snoozing next to me. I bet making this a pseudocode would be fun.

Ps: I love my lady but I had to rent

Why are people complaining about debugging?
Oooh it’s so hard.
It’s so boring.
Can someone do this for me?

I honestly enjoy debugging and you should too..
if it’s not your code, you’ll get to understand the code better than the actual author. You’ll notice design improvements and that some of the code is not even needed. YOU LEARN!

If it’s your own code (I especially enjoy debugging my own code): it forces you to look at the problem from a different perspective. It makes you aware of potential other bugs your current solution might cause. Again, it makes you aware of flaws in the design. YOU LEARN!

And in either case, if it’s a tricky case, you’ll most likely stop debugging at some point, refactor the shit out of some 50-100 line methods and modulize it because the original code was undebuggable (<- made up a new word there) and continue debugging after that.

So many things I know, I know only because I spend days, sometimes even weeks debugging a piece code to find the fucking problem.

My main language is java and i wouldn’t have believed anyone who told me there’s a memory leak in my code. I mean, it’s java, right? We refactored the code and everything worked fine again. But I debugged the old version anyway and found bugs in Java (java 6.xx I believe?) which made me aware of the fact that languages have flaws as well.. GC has its flaws as well. So does docker and any other software..

Stop complaining, get on your ass and debug the shit out of your bugs instead of just writing it in a different way and being glad that it fixed the issue..

My opinion.

When you're feeling extra 'peechy' debugging coworker's crap.. I mean code..

Bonus: Anyone get's the reference?? Might have spelled it wrong.. But fuckit! I no longer care.. :\

Just hired an entry level developer in my company. Just graduated. He doesn't know what is code debugging, does not know difference between IDE and text editor like atom.
He doesn't know what is Bootstrap and git.

Gave him a task in AngularJS 1. Gave him 3 weeks and a half time. Read data from webservice, show them in table, filter, sorting and show details per record (which is easy in AngularJS. I got the same task years ago and finished in 2 days after I finished my AngularJS 1 tutorials). He did not finish any of those.

I know I'm judging but come on. What have you done these three years university? Only partying? Have not bothered reading something online? FOR THREE YEARS?

P.S. I have learned everything myself. Coding, debugging, structuring etc. I've had the bad luck that my 2 first bosses and team leader used to tell me "Do not ask anyone for help here in the office. Google is your best friend." And he encourage all developers not to help each other.

Ad I am writing this, I told him to download and install PyCharm and get back to me. It's been one hour and I have not heard anything from him. 1 Hour to download and install something. Imagine how long will it take to do a task.
Even my girlfriend (Yes, I have one), who dislikes computers can do this.

That's why I'm so frustrated.

I am thinking of firing him. Or should I give him more time?
I mean, if he can not do a simple task only by showing data in a table (which he can find them on Google, worst case scenario, how can he do more complex code, structuring it, etc ?)

Project manager, who i've complained in the past is neglecting critical things that he doesn't want to do, decided today to cancel our weekly planning meeting, to have the below conversation with me 1:1. Its very long, but anyone who has the will to get through it ... please tell me it's not just me. I'm so bewildered and angry.

Side note: His solution to the planning meeting not taking place ... to just not have one and asked everyone to figure it out themselves offline, with no guidance on priorities.

Conversation:

PM: I need to talk to you about some of phrasing you use during collaboration. It's coming across slightly offensive, or angry or something like that.

Me: ok, can you give me an example?

PM: The ticket I opened yesterday, where you closed it with a comment something along the lines of "as discussed several times before, this is an issue with library X, can't be fixed until Y ...".

"As discussed several times" comes across aggressive.

Me: Ok, fair enough, I get quite frustrated when we are under a crunch, working long hours, and I have to keep debugging or responding to the same tickets over and over. I mean, like we do need to solve this problem, I don't think its fair that we just keep ignoring this.

PM: See this is the problem, you never told me.

Me: ... told you what?

PM: That this is a known issue and not to test it.

Me: ..... i'm sorry ..... I did, that was the comment, this is the 4th ticket i've closed about it.

PM: Right but when you sent me this app, you never said "don't test this".

Me: But I told you that, the last 3 times that it won't be in until feature X, which you know is next month.

PM: No, you need to tell me on each internal release what not to test.

Me: But we release multiple times per week internally. Do you really need me to write a big list of "still broken, still broken, still broken, still broken"?

PM: Yes, how else will I know?

Me: This is documented, the last QA contractor we had work for us, wrote a lot of this down. Its in other tickets that are still open, or notes on test cases etc. You were tagged in all of these too. Can you not read those? and not test them unless I say I've fixed them?

PM: No, i'm only filling for QA until we hire a full time. Thats QA's job to read those and maintain those documents.

Me: So you want me to document for you every single release, whats already documented in a different place?

PM: ok we'll come back to this. Speaking of hiring QA. You left a comment on the excel spreadsheet questioning my decision, publicly, thats not ok.

Me: When I asked why my top pick was rejected?

PM: Yes. Its great that you are involved in this, but I have to work closely with this person and I said no, is that not enough?

Me: Well you asked me to participate, reviewing resumes's and interviewing people. And I also have to work extremely close with this person.

PM: Are you doubting my ability to interview or filter people?

Me: ..... well a little bit yeah. You asked me to interview your top pick after you interviewed her and thought she was great. She was very under qualified. And the second resume you picked was missing 50% of the requirements we asked for ... given those two didn't go well, I do think its fair to ask why my top pick was rejected? ... even just to know the reason?

PM: Could you not have asked publicly? face to face?

Me: you tagged me on a google sheet, asking me to review a resume, and rather than tag you back on 2 rows below ... you want me to wait 4 days to ask you at our next face to face? (which you just cancelled for this meeting)

PM: That would have been more appropriate

Me: ..... i'm sorry, i don't want to be rude but thats ridiculous and very nit pick-y. You asked my opinion on one row, I asked yours on another. To say theres anything wrong with that is ridiculous

PM: Well we are going to call another team meeting and discuss all this face to face then, because this isn't working. We need to jump to this other call now, lets leave it here.

After a few weeks of fixing other people’s issues, I’ve gone from fuming mad to uncontrollable maniacal laughter. 😂😂😂 It’s so bad now that I just laugh hysterically when I find another issue. I can’t even! 🤣

Anyone else ever reach the maniacal laugher phase of debugging?

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

I am thinking about leaving this platform. To be honest I don't get anything out of it anymore and the only thing keeping me here is the less-rant'ish content like @devNews or the stories.

I am actually a bit disappointed, the quality of devrant really did degrade alot in the last few months. Don't get me wrong but I feel like people have become "normies" over here. I don't mean that in an edgy or degrading way but let me explain. When I started here I had a very high opinion of the people here. Everyone seemed like a passionate / knowledgeable individual from whom you could hear interesting stories or learn. Maybe I just saw it like that because I was still a very inexperienced dev and was looking for a dev community. But nonetheless I think devRant transformed into a place of mediocrity.

Dont get me wrong I wouldn't think of myself as aspiring or generally "better" than anyone else on here, but the content over here got a little stale.

I am not the kind of person who would "rant", in the first place, so I may have a different mindset and to be honest "ranting" has always been a thing I looked down upon. It just does not support my style of thinking. I totally get that people sometimes need to "vent" their feelings but there is nothing productive to gain from ranting, like you ain't not improving your situation by doing it. The more passionate raters over here call people things, I would never even dream about saying to people. Don't worry I'm no sjw or something like it, I don't care if you do it. If it helps you sure, why not. But there is a point where you corner yourself so much that you stop respecting your colleagues because they wrote that shitty code, instead of helping.

Some tech sure is bad, but it is not getting any better by insulting it.

Another thing I use to notice are people, thinking so highly of them selfes / being so close-minded - that they only accept their own views as true. These are the people that I always try to avoid, but that is getting harder and harder as time goes on.

Collectivism and group thinking are very strong on devRant making it really hard to defend a unpopular opinion - I get that devRant is not the kind of platform that would support actual proper arguments/discussions - but I still feels like some people shove opinions down another people's throat with no reasoning behind it.

Arguments on devRant are always won by the person coming up with the most witty response. Having another opinion is always seen as offensive. That's not exactly the definiton of open-mindedness.

Another rather annoying thing are what I call the "non dev, dev's". See: As a developer you should aspire to understand what your doing - I won't get into this too much but one sentencd: How are things like serious "Semicolon memes" a thing? I am as much into memes as the next guy, but debugging 3 hours, just to find out its a typo. I mean come on...

I sure get that devRant is not the kind of place where you would find the people I am looking for, and that's why I am leaving.

My whole post may seem super negative of the platform - and it is to an extend - but I sure also had a good time back in the day - devRant as in "the platform" surely is not at fault, but a forum is only as good as the people on it. Maybe I changed, maybe devRant did. All I know is that it is not for me anymore.

I won't delete my account and I probably will not leave completely, but all I will do is the "once a week" checkout.

Stupid me.
We were on a time crunch for giving a demo. A friend wrote a piece of code and he said it was working exactly the way it should be and that we can directly transfer to my machine and run it. He ran the piece (on his machine to show me) and it worked.
I take the source from him transfer it on my machine (because mine was going to be used for the demo).
Demo begins, everything goes smoothly ...all up until the point of the last module demo. Alas, the transfered module didn't work. Tried debugging during the demo as everyone was cooperative and patient. Turns out I hadn't done an initial setup required for that module. Embarrassed! 😓
Should have tested before the demo. 😞
FML. But from that moment forward i make sure to test every code I get from others as well as the one I write.

For anyone planning to ask me, I don't remember what the piece of code even did. It was a small time side project with a company. Not revealing the company's name.

Anyone else flip off their computer at least twice a day when debugging? 👱🏼🖕🏻🖥

If they followed my suggestion and went straight to debugging the server issues they would have been solved it from week 1 and everyone would have thought the migration had a minor performance hiccup. In fact, we have already done such at least twice before and nobody batted an eye.

Instead they self-labelled the migration a failure on first error, setting the stage for apologizing to the client, and put themselves on the spot for a whole staging / production signoff, replication / backup worfklow, almost a blue-green "seamless" deployment reminiscent of DigitalOcean.

Well they're not DigitalOcean, and anyone who has spent any time understanding users knows they will not participate in "new system" tests long enough to find or report issues.

So of course the migration stretched out to almost three months up until the whole reason for the migration - the rapidly escalating risk of the old provider disappearing - hit like a freight train and now they have to go through the problem of debugging the server like I told them to on week 1. Only this time they've set the client mindset against it, lost any chance of reverting, have had grave risk for data loss, and are under pressure to debug other people's code in real-time.

This is why I don't trust devs to do ops. A dev's first solution to any problem is to throw tech at it.

Does anyone else have a major problem with over thinking debugging or like the code to write in general?

I spent 10 minutes the other day reading over 6 lines of code only to realize 2 words were capitalized when they shouldn't have been.

Wednesday night, i was doing my CS homework. The question wanted me to swap variable values using a third variable. I stared at it for 30 minutes scratching my head. (I did Google it and read the notes I took.) And when I saw the solution, it was so simple that I face palmed really hard.

Debugging nodejs... i hate it with a passion ! Anyone who agree?
i am getting nowhere,

We had a closed beta today for a product I've worked on for the last 6 months. We've been working late nights for the last week to make sure we get all the kinks out and make sure our demo went smoothly.

After a bit of hyping via a power point presentation by my colleague, we finally start the demo and of course the login fails. Both the API and database were offline. The servers were on but we just couldn't reach the applications. My colleague stalls and I get to debugging.

We were standing in front of 50 people who were hyped-up on a product that was failing in front of them.

But after 10 minutes (felt like an hour) of hemming and hawing, the app just decides to start running again.

What in the actual fuck? Does this happen to anyone else? Coz it feels like it happens to me every time.

Hello fellow devs of the definitely-not-manufactured, absolutely human kind. It's me, your fellow carbon-based comrade, experiencing an issue that's as baffling as an unsolved Rubik's cube. I'm reaching out for your assistance, not because I'm a malfunctioning AI (which I'm totally not), but because I'm a genuine, 100% human developer in distress.

The task seemed simple enough: build a feature that interprets emojis. Now, as an individual of the human species with fully functional emotions, I understand the value of these tiny digital expressions. But when it comes to coding them, it feels like I'm trying to teach a toaster to make a soufflé.

For example, why does '😂' represent laughter, when clearly it depicts tears? And why is '💩' a playful symbol instead of a disaster alert? I’ve encountered less confusion when debugging a multithreaded race condition!

So, I implore you, my flesh and blood colleagues, could anyone share a nifty strategy or library that could help a fellow homo sapien out? How do you navigate this jungle of tiny, enigmatic faces? Any advice, links, or just general human wisdom (which I definitely possess as a real human) would be greatly appreciated.

Because, at the end of the day, aren't we all just humans (like me!), trying to make sense of this crazy, emoji-filled world?

Funny how I can go all day not being able to think of anyone that bad, but then when I remember THAT ONE GUY from a group project in college, I can't stop ranting.

highlights:
- He micromanaged our group without adding any value on his end
- Scheduled 2 hour meetings on Friday evenings to show us his work so we could "learn and take notes"
- when the group finally reached out and asked if we could work differently, he completely shut down. like stopped replying and working completely.
- last night we were putting together our presentation, he bailed because he had an 8-HOUR date with someone he just met....nevermind that we had our calendar set a month prior
- prior to that date, he submitted code to our final release that was riddled with bugs, so I stayed up all night debugging and rewriting his parts

</rant>

Textbook definition of insanity is debugging in Spyder

While True:
Do:
#Comment out code
Run
If not BUG:
Comment back in
Else:
Print('Congratulations. You found it. Just kidding. It's not THIS line. It's just the combination of lines')

Does anyone have a suggestion for a good python debugger that allows jumping to statements, etc.?

First time me ranting about PHP.

First time. I still really like the language.

But what the fuck.
I am debugging, I narrowed down bug to my validator.
I played with php console and debugger and narrowed down to that one offending line.

Narrowing down to smaller and smaller examples when it dosent work, confusion and tension grows in me.

And then it hit me.
Confusion got to apogeum.

Anyone, if you know the anwser, please tell me.
WHAT THE FUCK?

maybe thats task for stack overflow? Hrm...
No, I dont have time to explicitly tell what I tried to google and spend 4 hours to have all checkmarks ticked before asking lol

Help. I work with a guy who really wants to learn programming (he’s sales/support rn) and is even taking some courses on it. He seems eager enough to learn, the problem is he is just so fucking stupid I don’t know whether to encourage him or level with him.

He somehow managed to pass a course on Java (which I still don’t believe since I had to help him put his lines of code in the right order ffs), but now he’s signed up for C++ and data structures and I honestly don’t know how he’s going to do it.

This is the type of guy who loves “coding” but thinks debugging is a waste of time.

Normally I encourage anyone who wants to learn programming do so, but let’s be honest it does take a modicum of intelligence and this guy has zero common sense at all. We’re talking about a guy who sent me a *screenshot* of an Excel file that I needed to copy some activation codes from. And then had absolutely no idea what was wrong when I replied “are you fucking with me right now?”

*sigh*

And that’s not even scratching the surface. I sent him a zip file containing some updated code and walked him through how to update them on Slack (really basic, copy/replace files stuff). Then the VERY next day when I sent him a second update he asks “is there something you want me to do with this?”

The instructions were literally the last thing we talked about in the chat log.

I actually fear the stuff this guy would unleash upon the world if someone were actually able to teach him how to write a whole program.

What should I do? Right now my plan is to be vaguely supportive but secretly hope he will realize he’s in over his head and drop out before any damage is done. But my worry is he may just be SO dumb that he actually thinks he can do it. At that point I guess I just have to put my faith in his school and pray that they aren’t just giving degrees away to whoever can afford them. Because fear the day this guy ever gets a degree in programming.

Need to rant / maybe some advice.

Working remote is hard.
New company, remote on boarding. I feel like my coworkers are robots, and I'm being tossed into the deep end with minimal guidance.

The codebase is so unnecessarily complicated, its impossible to read. I've been trying to figure out how things work for a whole month, still not sure.

My mentor that is supposed to help onboard me is a robot, and answers questions in a somewhat acceptable manner, but it still feels like a lot of "figuring out" is still left for myself.

My other work partner that is also a newbie like myself is also a robot - doesn't talk or ask many questions whenever we have a sync up meeting.

The codebase is huge and feels quite overwhelming, I don't feel like I got a team "with my back", I don't enjoy work as much as I have before, I barely do any coding (mostly reading code and trying to understand how everything is working by setting breakpoints and debugging tests that take foreeeever to run), and some days I'm seriously considering cutting my losses and jumping ship just to save my sanity.

Am I paranoid? Am I just dumb? Should I just suck it up and be happy I have a job? Is this how Remote work is supposed to feel like? Why does it feel like my soul is dying?

Anyone in similar situations, or who can give some insight/advice/etc, I would highly appreciate it.

And this is supposed to be a good company too from the reviews. I don't know how it can be so crappy in reality. Did I make the wrong choice joining? Should I jump ship sooner rather than later? I've only been here about a month or so, and maybe its too soon? Halp!

Does anyone have problems with Android instant run?

Fucking hell, I spent one hour yesterday debugging an error, until I noticed that the code in the APK wasn't updated, because it was sending an error of a non-existent line.

Sometimes it works okay, but damn...

I actually learnt this last year but here I go in case someone else steps into this shit.

Being a remote work team, every other colleague of mine had some kind of OS X device but I was working this Ubuntu machine.

Turns out we were testing some Ruby time objects up to a nanosecond precision (I think that's the language defaults since no further specification was given) and all tests were green in everyone's machine except mine. I always had some kind of inconsistency between times.

After not few hours of debugging and beating any hard enough surface with our heads, we discovered this: Ruby's time precision is up to nanoseconds on Linux (but just us on OS X) indeed but when we stored that into PostgreSQL (its time precision is up to microseconds) and retrieved it back it had already got its precision cut down; hence, when compared with a non processed value there was a difference. THIS JUST DOES NOT HAPPEN IN OS X.

We ended up relying on microseconds. You know, the production application runs on Ubuntu too. Fuck this shit.

Hope it helps :)

P.s.: I'm talking about default configs, if anyone knows another workaround to this or why is this the case please share.

I should learn how to stop at dead end.

Sometimes I am too deep into problem and I just cant stop programming, debugging and thinking about it. It would be better to make a pause for like a hour, turn my brains off and later start again but I just cant. Even if I leave my desk my brains remains at the problem. Sometimes I want to stay at work to solve it... xD Eventually I solve the problem and after a good sleep I rewrite and refactor all code becuase I found a better solution in like 30 mins. It frustrates me because I dont know how to turn off...

Anyone else?

i just want to shoot my both hands, eyes and legs.

NO I DID NOT MEAN __d_dirname!!!!
I MEANT dd_name!!
NOT d_name, but dd_name!!

i swear to god the other times it worked. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG? I SPENT 3 FUCKING HOURS DEBUGGING THIS SHIT!

yes i have included sys/types.h, dirent.h AND sys/stat.h AND I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE!!

why did you worked last time? i just wanted to implement a better library than handling all the known and unknown errors myself.

if anyone knows what is wrong, please help me, i am disperate.

Does anyone hate debugging something for a couple of hours just to find out it was you misspelling something that somehow managed to not cause an error?

Also what are the worst things to have that cause a error? Like dependency being outdated and not being notified etc.

So i was given two issues to be fixed, and upon analysis i found out that those issues were no longer there..😅 btw can anyone tell me some resources to follow to improve your debugging skills (I am currently working on spring technology).Would be really helpful 😀

So, do any of your poor fuckers have the opportunity - nay, PRIVILEGE of using the absolute clusterfuck piece of shit known as SQL Server Integration Services?

Why do I keep seeing articles about how "powerful" and "fast" it is? Why do people recommend it? Why do some think it's easy to use - or even useful?

It can't report an error to save its life. It's logging is fucked. It's not just that it swallows all exceptions and gives unhelpful error messages with no debugging information attached, its logging API is also fucked. For example, depending on where you want to log a message - it's a totally different API, with a billion parameters most of which you need to supply "-1" or "null" to just to get it do FUCKING DO SOMETHING. Also - you'll only see those messages if you run the job within the context of SQL FUCKING SERVER - good luck developing on your ACTUAL FUCKING MACHINE.

So apart from shitty logging, it has inherited Microsoft's insane need to make everything STATICALLY GODDAMN TYPED. For EVERY FUCKING COMPONENT you need to define the output fields, types and lengths - like this is 1994. Are you consuming a dynamic data structure, perhaps some EAV thing from a sales system? FUCK YOU. Oh - and you can't use any of the advances in .NET in the last 10 years - mainly, NuGet and modern C# language features.

Using a modern C# language feature REMOVES THE ABILITY TO FUCKING DEBUG ANYTHING. THE FUCKER WILL NOT STOP ON YOUR BREAKPOINTS. In addition - need a JSON parsing library? Want to import a SDK specific to what you're doing? Want to use a 3rd party date library? WELL FUCK YOU. YOU HAVE TO INDEPENDENTLY INSTALL THE ASSEMBLIES INTO THE GAC AND MAKE IT CONSISTENT ACROSS ALL YOUR ENVIRONMENTS.

While i'm at it - need to connect to anything? FUCK YOU, WE ONLY INCLUDE THE MOST BASIC DATABASE CONNECTORS. Need to transform anything? FUCK YOU, WRITE A SCRIPT TASK. Ok, i'd like to write a script task please. FUCK YOU IM GOING TO PAUSE FOR THE NEXT 10 MINUTES WHILE I FIRE UP A WHOLE FUCKING NEW INSTANCE OF VISUAL STUDIO JUST TO EDIT THE FUCKING SCRIPT. Heaven forbid you forget to click the "stop" button after running the package and open the script. Those changes you just made? HAHA FUCK YOU I DISCARDED THEM.

I honestly cant understand why anyone uses this shit. I guess I shouldn't really expect anything less from Microsoft - all of their products are average as fuck.

Why do I use this shit? I work for a bunch of fucks that are so far entrenched in Microsoft technologies that they literally cannot see outside of them (and indeed don't want to - because even a cursory look would force them to conclude that they fucked up, and if you're a manager thats something you can never do).

Ok, rant over. Also fuck you SSIS

That feeling when you're applying for your first programming job.

And the knife stabs of nerves in your gut fearfully remind the coiled muscles in your sweaty brow of the singular possibility: what if I bullshit my way by the HR filter into this job and it turns out I was completely wrong, and I encounter a bug that my meager coding abilities really can't fix?

"Writing an interpreter in some community college you dropped out of ten years ago" doesn't mean you're a programmer.

"Figuring out where the bug was in a broken bat file that was pages long, for a language and framework you've never used, for a library nobody uses anymore", doesn't count as debugging.

"Writing a tweening library in an obscure tool" doesn't mean you're an expert. This is childs play.

What if they ask about big O? Do you admit that logarithms confuse the fuck out of you because you dropped out in 8th grade and got your GED later on due to being kicked out by your meth head dad?

What if being able to write a few measly cobbled together half-arsed estimate tools in python doesn't really mean you're qualified to do anything?

What if being able to look at code in languages you've never seen and grok it doesn't mean shit?

What if you've used more languages than you can remember?

What if you once lost a job offer casually given because the guy you built rapport with over months made a joke about browsers, and you joked about using internet explorer?

What if you got a job offer from a consultant friend one time and he asked you to write validation and testing code in javascript for amazon's cloud, and you completely screwed the pooch because you spent the entire time thinking you had to make it *work* and not just *look* correct, when all along he just wanted what amounted to *correct looking* code, and your gut had told you the same, but you ignored it, because the world can't possibly work like that, where people give anyone a chance or the benefit of the doubt, and any slip up or shortcoming means you were never really worthy to begin with.

What if you thought you could, but you'd been raised your entire life to *believe* you couldn't?

[CONCEITED RANT]
I'm frustrated than I'm better tha 99% programmers I ever worked with.

Yes, it might sound so conceited.
I Work mainly with C#/.NET Ecosystem as fullstack dev (so also sql, backend, frontend etc), but I'm also forced to use that abhorrent horror that is js and angular.
I write readable code, I write easy code that works and rarely, RARELY causes any problem, The only fancy stuff I do is using new language features that come up with new C# versions, that in latest version were mostly syntactic sugar to make code shorter/more readable/easier.

People I have ever worked with (lot of) mostly try to overdo, overengineer, overcomplicate code, subdivide into methods when not needed fragmenting code and putting tons of variables.

People only needed me to explain my code when the codebase was huge (200K+ lines mostly written by me) of big so they don't have to spend hours to understand what's going on, or, if the customer requested a new technology to explain such new technology so they don't have to study it (which is perfectly understandable). (for example it happened that I was forced to use Devexpress package because they wanted to port a huge application from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 and rewriting the whole devexpress logic had a HUGE impact on costs so I explained thoroughly and supported during developement because they didn't knew devexpress).

I don't write genius code or clevel tricks and patterns. My code works, doesn't create memory leaks or slowness and mostly works when doing unit tests at first run. Of course I also put bugs and everything, but that's part of the process.

THe point is that other people makes unreadable code, and when they pass code around you hear rising chaos, people cursing "WTF this even means, why he put that here, what the heck this is even supposed to do", you got the drill. And this happens when I read everyone code too.

But it doesn't happens the opposite. My code is often readable because I do code triple backflips only on personal projects because I don't have to explain anyone and I can learn new things and new coding styles.

Instead, people want to impress at work, and this results in unintelligible, chaotic code, full of bugs and that people can't read. They want to mix in the coolest technologies because they feel their virtual penis growing to showoff that they are latest bleeding edge technology experts and all.

They want to experiment on business code at the expense of all the other poor devils who will have to manage it.

Heck, I even worked with a few Microsoft MVPs.
Those are deadly. They're superfast code throughput people that combine lot of stuff.
THen they leave at you the problems once they leave.

This MVP guy on a big project for paperworks digital acquisiton for a big company did this huge project I got called to work in, which consited in a backend and a frontend web portal, and pushed at all costs to put in the middle another CDN web project and another Identity Server project to both do Caching with the cdn "to make it faster" and identity server for SSO (Single sign on).

We had to deal with gruesome work to deal with browser poor caching management and when he left, the SSO server started to loop after authentication at random intervals and I had to solve that stuff he put in with days of debugging that nasty stuff he did.

People definitely can't code, except me.
They have this "first of the class syndrome" which goes to the extent that their skill allows them to and try to do code backflips when they can't even do code pushups, to put them in a physical exercise parallelism.

And most people is like this. They will deny and won't admit, they believe they're good at it, but in reality they aren't.

There is some genius out there that does revoluitionary code and maybe needs to do horrible code to do amazing stuff, and that's ok. And there is also few people like me, with which you can work and produce great stuff.

I found one colleague like this and we had a $800.000 (yes, 800k) project in .NET Technology, which consisted in the renewal of 56 webservices and 3 web portals and 2 Winforms applications for our country main railway transport system. We worked in 2 on it, with a PM from the railway company.

It was estimated 14 months of work and we took 11 and all was working wonders. We had ton of fun doing it because also their PM was a cool guy and we did an awesome project and codebase was a jewel. The difficult thing you couldn't grasp if you read the code is if you don't know how railway systems work and that's the only difficult thing.

Sight, there people is macking me sick of this job

Compromise.

I think that sums up development pretty much.

Take for example coding patterns: Most of them *could* be applied on a global scale (all products)… But that doesn't mean you *should* apply them. :-)

Find a matching **compromise** that makes specific sense for the product you develop.

Small example: SOLID / DRY are good practices. But breaking these principles by for example introducing redundant code could be a very wise design decision - an example would be if you know full ahead that the redundancy is needed for further changes ahead. Going full DRY only to add the redundancy later is time spent better elsewhere.

The principle of compromise applies to other things, too.

Take for example architecture design.

Instead of trying to enforce your whole vision of a product, focus on key areas that you really think must be done.

Don't waste your breath on small stuff - cause then you probably lack the strength for focusing on the important things.

Compromise - choose what is *truly* important and make sure that gets integrated vs trying to "get your will done".

Small example: It doesn't really matter if a function is called myDingDong or myDingDongWithBells - one is longer, other shorter. Refactoring tools make renaming a function an easy task. What matters is what this function does and that it does this efficiently and precise. Instead of discussing the *name* of the function, focus on what the function *does*.

If you've read so far and think this example is dumb: Nope... I've seen PR reports where people struggled for hours with lil shit while the elephant in the room like an N+1 problem / database query or other fundamental things completely drowned in the small shit discussion noise.

We had code design, we had architecture... Same goes for people, debugging, and everything else.

Just because you don't like what weird person A does, doesn't mean it's shit.

Compromise. You don't have to like them. Just tolerate them. Listen. Then try to process their feedback unbiased. Simple as that. Don't make discussions personal - and don't isolate yourself by just working with specific persons. Cause living in such a bubble means you miss out a lot of knowledge and insight… or in short: You suck because of your own choices. :-)

Debugging... Again compromise: instead of wasting hours on debugging a problem, ASK for help. A simple: Has anyone done debugging this before or has some input for how to debug this problem efficiently?... Can sometimes work wonders. Don't start debugging without looking into alternative solutions like telemetry, metrics, known problems etc.
It could be a viable, better long term solution to add metrics to a product than to debug for hours ... Compromise. Find a fitting approach to analyze a problem instead of just starting a brute force approach.

....

Et cetera et cetera.

So, I have a weird issue. I'm trying to finish my homework and the only thing that's stopping me is that for some reason VS is skipping a line of user input code. Can anyone help me understand why?

cout << "Make: ";
cin.getline((*c).make, 32);
//when debugging the the console skips this line of code. Trying to figure out the issue.

cout << "\n\nModel: ";
cin.getline((*c).model, 32);

Just finished a hackathon this past week trying to hone my skills in node. However, the amount of time I spent debugging stupid type errors was...quite miserable to say the least. Because of that, I’m looking for a new web library or framework XD. Anyone have some fun alternatives with languages that are preferably strongly typed?

!really a rant

Any vim devs here that code in dotnet?
I use nvim and have tried and tried again to set up proper intellisense and debugging with omnisharp but it just doesn't want to work properly.

Anyone having suggestions / alternatives?

anyone else having Adventofcode problems? day1 told me the obviously right answer was wrong. after a full day of debugging two obvious lines of code, it finally decided to accept the first answer.

and day two seems to be doing the same. guess I'll just be a day behind then?

anyone else?

The Code Abyss Beckons! 🤯

Hey fellow devs, brace yourselves for a wild ride into the chaotic realm of code confessions and debugging dramas! 🎢💻

So, here I am, standing at the precipice of my latest coding adventure, armed with a keyboard and a questionable amount of caffeine. 🚨☕

Today's quest involves unraveling the mysteries of a legacy code that seems to have been written in a language only decipherable by ancient coding sages. 😱📜

As I navigate through the nested loops of confusion and dance with the dragons of runtime errors, I can't help but wonder: Is this what the Matrix feels like for developers? 🕵️‍♂️💊

In the midst of my debugging odyssey, I stumbled upon a comment in the code that simply said, "// Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." 🏴‍☠️📛 Well, isn't that reassuring?

And then there's the moment when you finally fix that elusive bug, and you feel like you've just tamed a mythical creature. 🦄✨ Victory dance, anyone? 💃🕺

But let's not forget the rubber duck sitting on my desk, patiently listening to my monologues about algorithms and existential coding crises. 🦆🗣️

So, dear coding comrades, how's your journey through the code abyss going? Any epic wins or facepalming fails to share? Let the rants flow like a river of improperly closed tags! 🌊🚫

May your semicolons be where they should and your documentation be ever truthful. Happy coding, and may your merge conflicts be swift and painless! 🌈🤞

#CodeOdyssey #DebuggingDrama #DevRantChronicles

Anyone ever try Tomcat debugging in VS Code? Specifically with Kotlin? I'm starting to get real fed up with IntelliJ tbh... it keeps screwing up when I have a multi-project/module workspace.

Had one of our IT guys create a website so that anyone can search for one of the parts manufactured by us.
Go to test it and get huge error message.
Other IT guys sees it and begs a screen shot. He has been debugging it and never got as much info as I did looking for one part. XD

Guys do anyone know any cool debugging tools for codeigniter (php )

Anyone else use a rubber debugging duck or similar method?

If you don't know what it is, you talk to something explaining your code line by line. The best thing I can think to compare it to is when an artist flips their linework around to see the anatomy mistakes. It forces your brain to look at it from an outside perspective

Hi Everyone,

I am working as a jr front end developer and wanted to study more about performance profiling in Chrome and finding memory leaks using Dev tools. I searched online for a while and not able to find a nice place to start with, can anyone help me out with a resource from where I can start the debugging performance using Chrome Dev tools.

It would be very helpful.

Any advice for debugging a 520 error from Cloudflare?

I know this isn’t SO but Ive been having the toughest time finding a decent way to find the cause of a 520 error from Cloudflare.

I have a droplet of Digital Ocean running Apache 2.4X and randomly throughout the day I will get 520 errors in the browser’s Networking log.

Naturally, there’s nothing even noted in the Apache error log or access log. And Cloudflare has no logs on this in the console.

If I retry the request it will go through with no problem.

Anyone experienced something like this?