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Search - "fixing bugs into the night"
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Right.. I spent the hours leading up to the year change by adding a YouTube to MP3 downloader into my Telegram bot. After a bit of fiddling it turned out okay, and the commit for it was mentioned to the last for the year 2020.
I mentioned this in one of my chats, and users came in with more issues. Told them it's the last commit for the year and I'll keep myself to it. I did adjust the code a bit though to fix those issues, awaiting a commit after midnight.
Midnight passes and 2020 turns into 2021.
I commit the new features, and quickly implemented another one I already thought of as well, but needed its own commit.
Quickly afterwards it turns out that the /mp3 feature actually breaks the bot somewhat, especially on long tracks. Users add a slew of 10h songs into what essentially became a long queue of single-threaded bot action (or rather lack thereof).
I made the /mp3 command accessible to myself only like I did with some other administrative commands already. Still no dice, the bot rejected the commands but executed part of the /mp3 command anyway.
I look a bit further into the code and it turns out that while I was restructuring some functions, I forgot to make the admin() function exit the script after it sends the rejection onwards. This was a serious security issue and meant that all authentication was void. Fortunately the chat did not realize this - one of the commands that became available as a result was literally a terminal on the bot's system.
I fix the issue in 7 commits after midnight total, 3 of which were related to /mp3 and admin(). We're now 1 hour after midnight.
Happy New Year everyone... :')6 -
Ah, the ancient art of copy-paste development – where originality goes to die and bugs come out to play. It's like a cursed incantation that tempts even the best of us into the dark abyss of shortcuts.
You think you're saving time by copying that snippet from Stack Overflow, but little do you know, you've just invited a horde of gremlins into your codebase. Suddenly, your once-cohesive architecture looks like a patchwork quilt sewn by a drunkard.
And let's not forget the thrill of debugging when you realize that the copied code references variables that don't even exist in your context. "Ah, yes, I remember copying this gem at 2 AM. What could possibly go wrong?"
But wait, there's more! Copy-pasting also introduces a special kind of chaos when updates are needed. You find yourself fixing the same bug in five different places because you couldn't be bothered to encapsulate that logic in a reusable function.
So here's a heartfelt salute to all the copy-paste warriors out there, bravely navigating the treacherous waters of borrowed code. May your future coding endeavors involve more thinking, less CTRL+C, and a lot fewer late-night bug hunts!1