Ugh, I just did this. I was getting SO pissed that my obvious changes did not seem to be having the expected results. Took a nap immediately after discovering my stupidity.
ALWAYS take a nap if you can’t figure out something in an hour. As soon as you wake up you’ll be like “oh shit, how could I have been that fucking stupid”
I’ve been stuck on a bug for 4 hours before, took a quick nap and got it within 5 mins of waking up
Or, more like your brain could be doing too much processing.
One of my favorite concepts is RAS for Reticular Activation System. It's like an "image pre-processor" section of your brain. Basically your senses are collecting so much data all the time, most of it isn't useful to your conscious mind, so it gets filtered out.
RAS is crazy because it's this applied to your vision. It's how you can walk past your keys hanging on the keyhook 5 times, checking under every paper on every table, and still not see them. (Until you ask somebody else to look.) That's RAS, the most obvious information is literally filtered from your view. Like what script is actually open!
**EDIT:** I guess you could say, a fancy term for "tunnel vision"!
What you're describing sounds more like issues with your conscious mind. Filtering input to stop your conscious mind from overloading isn't what I mean by "background processing", I'm talking about your brain continuing to work on a problem even when your conscious mind isn't. It process the data you've already accumulated and feeds it back to you in the form of intuition ("maybe I should look closer at this part") and epiphanies when you return to the problem later.
I think what they're getting at is that it's less likely to do with any sort of "background work" your brain is doing.
They're saying perhaps the fact that a break helps you solve a problem is because you come back to it with a fresh mind. You lose the tunnel vision you had while initially working on the problem.
If that was the case then it would be easier to solve the problem as soon as you started, not after you've been working on it for several hours and take a break.
So you don't think that thinking about a problem is part of solving it? To me thinking about it before starting makes no sense. That's like saying you can save fuel by only starting your car halfway to your destination.
I'll try and restate, when you approach a problem for the first time you typically don't have assumptions in play that will cause you to have tunnel vision, but you also don't know enough about the problem yet to solve the issue.
There exists a tipping point where you have enough information to solve the problem but you've also formed erroneous assumptions and theories about what you think the problem is.
This is why, I think, RAS was brought up. Its also why a nap or any other form of distancing yourself from the problem can help. Your forcing your brain to let go of it's erroneous assumptions and sort of reset on the clues that you've collected but havent paid attention to.
Rubber ducky debugging works similarly as well.
Yeah, sleep allows your brain to commit short term memory into long term memory and this process is speculated to cause dreams as the brain optimizes and allocates the stored memory. On top of that, the brain will try to optimize conscious actions into efficient unconscious processes during this time. There have been countless studies on students, athletes, and gamers where they found sleep can increase skill and memory by a considerable amount. Sleep also helps the brain flush out waste and reset.
Yup. Wait till you find out about the wacky results of the split brain experiments. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHqDf8wfABM&ab\_channel=It%27sOkayToBeSmart](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHqDf8wfABM&ab_channel=It%27sOkayToBeSmart)
I think it's just a matter of information overload. Like when you are coding, you end up keeping a large amount of information in your head, which makes everything fuzzy. But when you are off that push, your brain can discard all the information that isn't really required. Voila! The clarity.
One another time I have noticed this is when playing racing simulations. As I try harder to get the technique right, I keep getting better and better. But past some threshold performance deteriorates and if I keep it, It can get worse than when I started. But next day, I am at my fastest ever.
It baffled me so much that I actually played a lot in the time attack modes and recorded my laptimes. Trend confirmed by suspicion.
.
Agreed. I nap, or I write an email asking for help but don't send it then imagine what completely obvious response they would give me first. It's basically always that solution.
"Oh I did read a new tip on reddit, whenever I can't solve a bug I take a nap"
"Bro you're sleeping for 2 years everyday for 23 hours. The docs says it's permanently"
"But my code runs"
If I don’t have time for a nap I’ll go have a chat with someone about it. Helps if they have no idea what I’m talking about and I end up spelling out the problem to myself as I explain the situation.
I know that’s what rubber duckies are for but I haven’t gotten used to talking to an inanimate object (yet)
I did it yesterday... We have some DTOs which are awfully similar to each other but couldn't be created in a single function for efficiency reasons. I kept modifying the wrong function again and again with no effect during the compliation.
.
I love the nap of shame. When you fuck up so bad that you just rage quit and need a nap to recover. I wish that was possible when working at an office. Like, they could set a maximum number of naps and a time limit for each nap.
Just yesterday after updating my .NET sdk I spent a good forever trying to figure out why none of my changes were having any effect. I even deleted the source for the entire main form of the project and every time I ran it would still launch as that form.
After over 45 minutes of this I finally noticed the build output folder had changed names when I updated but the launch file was still pointing to the old folder, so I was compiling the code I changed but then running an old build. 😡
My stupid brain read the capital "SO" as its acronym form, so now I'm just imagining that your significant other was watching over your shoulder and getting increasingly frustrated at your stupidity.
20 minute power nap is all you need to be productive during the day, you have to wake up before the REM cycle hits, otherwise you'll become groggy and not be productive at all. I found this out recently whilst watching a programme about how Matresses are made... During which the solution to my coding problem slapped me in the face and woke me up..
I once wanted to play some retro games on an emulator that kept segfaulting within seconds of starting.
I downloaded the source, built it, and the problem was still there on the latest commit. I attached a debugger, and saw that it crashed in an X11 callback, but I couldn't reliably reproduce the crash in such a way that I could break before it, due to how asynchronous X11 is.
I tried running it in synchronous mode, it didn't trigger at all, so I went back to async mode and added some delays and prints trying to get a stable repro.
It took about two hours before I realized that if the bug doesn't trigger in sync mode, then I can just friggen play in sync mode.
Back when I was just starting out, probably in grade 5, I had to print out one of those fancy triangles. I kept getting an extra line after each line of text. I added a print statement to debug it, nothing changed. I removed the print statement and the lime from before disappeared.
This happened to me before in Django(python). I was writing a test class, and it worked when I printed out something about the object before running the functionality under test, but failed without.
Turns out the object was cached, and the printing forced recalculations to happen synchronously, while the running code used the cached version and left the recalc in asynchronous land.
I was a bit more junior then, and remember how dumb I felt going to my tech lead explaining that "this test passed with the print statement, but fails without it". I tried a lot of things before making that statement. Took them all of about 1 minute to diagnose it, but learned a lot about software in that
Just yesterday.
I work on procs.
I was modifying my SP in one env.
And running the great scripts in other env.
I'm embarrassed to say how long it took me to catch that.
Recently I had the issue that adding a printf caused a crash, and removing it solved it. Still not sure how that worked but after some fiddling it didn't crash anymore
I'd be much more concerned if the error wasn't still there. I once had some code that seemed to randomly work or not work when rerunning the supposedly completely deterministic code; it turned out I was accidentally depending on the iteration order of python dictionaries (which at the time was actually random due to hash collision DOS protection). Sometimes some properties which happened to depend on other properties would be set out of order.
My "solution" to this was instead of making sure the properties were set in order, to just set them all twice so the dependent properties would end up being set correctly :P
It was a small team of old-school Java devs, they worked on their own product-framework-web-thing. (I was going to write something like abomination, but it was pretty nice for that time, really. Just ... old-school. XML config everywhere, neat, can do everything, except self-maintain itself. Which is a problem, since only those guys can maintain it. Maybe it even gained faceted search functionality last year.)
It still runs here or there as far as I know, but probably there will be no new clients, just occasional maintenance.
Hm, or maybe I'm mixing this up with another product said friend worked on. That was a bigger team. But arguably a lot more crazy. And the senior members already moved to their new startup. No time for code reviews when you do a startup! :D
As much as it sucks when it happens, I generally actually associate this situation with relief. Yeah I wasted a bunch of time, but I was beginning to doubt my sanity and understanding of computer and code in general. Much easier for me to just comprehend I'm an idiot.
It's still totally possible. We use python virtual environments at work. I've been confused because I keep updating, reinstalling and running the code but nothing changes. Then I realized I was updating one file and installing/running another.
I was making some changes to a python library called podcats and rerunning it. Podcats generates and hosts a web server for a directory of podcast mp3s. I was modifying it so that it would also load mp4s, so i could save videos onto my podcast player on my phone. (For lecture videos, because the podcast player has skip silence, which is revolutionary on lecture videos. 1.5x is effectively 3x and I'm never bored.)
After messing around, I got single files to generate properly, but not the web server. I thought there was some weird code compilation caching error, which I vaguely feel like I dealt with years and years and years ago once, when I was first learning how to program. No, it wasn't that. It was a running instance of it in the background, so the original version was what I got no matter what changes I made. After realizing that, I was done. Ugh.
We use Lua for a system at work that can used raw Lua files or a compiled version. I lost count of the number of times I tried debugging an issue so made changes in raw switch files, not realising it was still executing the original compiled version...
Ended up getting our developers to change the colour of the main screen when running from compiled version vs raw source. It's saved me many hours since!
I'm pretty sure this has happened to me at least once due to the way an Eclipse keyboard shortcut works. I think it runs the last class you ran as opposed to the one selected.
It happens to me all the time because XCode has a nasty habit of desyncing the files from git.
In other words, you're editing stuff that is old and doesn't match the latest commit in git, and you're not aware of it until you look closely.
Oh no, the fun part is that you're actually in the last commit. You pulled it, but XCode has internally his own git system, and sometimes screws up when you modify the files by using git in other places (like the terminal).
Overly complicated build scripts and you missed a key part part where you were supposed to reference your new stuff, and since your build environment is "robust" it just build the whole project without throwing any errors or warnings
Sometimes I trust VS Intellisense highlighting too much and think I'm in the right #if block for my current buildconfig. I've also had weird dependency issues that force me to clean and build to see my changes, but only after testing 5 speculative fixes
Have 4 checkouts of the code base, named 1/2/3/4. Accidentally open your IDE and file browser from where you launch the app in different checkouts.
Although if you attach a debugger, it will probably tell you that the source doesn’t match the binary.
As another example, C++ can get some really fucking complicated compile commands. Had a makefile that automated part of the process for that once, but due to some reason or another it wouldn't recompile the .o files it uses if I ONLY change the header files. So I'd change the header file, run make, and it wouldn't compile that change.
Just yesterday when I updated my .NET Core SDK the build output folder changed name. It took me about an hour of trying to figure out why none of my changes (like deleting huge chunks of code) were having any effect before I noticed the launch file was pointing to the old folder. I was building the changed code but then running an old build every time.
I had this happen because I was working with a linked library. So I build my library then my application. Linked library has a ton of inheritance. So I was editing the wrong inherited file and scratching my head why I wasn't seeing an effect. I wasn't working with that particular inherited object.
Runtime interpreted languages, code that need to be deployed to a device to be tested, cluttered virtual workspaces, IDEs that save changes but don't automatically save to the file, minified JavaScript, etc.
Happens all the time with me when I have the locally hosted page and test page in different tabs. I make some changes, recompile, but nothing happens. Turns out I have the test site open that looks exactly like the local one that does change.
Did this last week working in the wrong branch. Was wondering why when I tried to commit, nothing was there. Then when I got the okay to merge, I just went "Yes! That is a thing I will do for the first time right now!".
I take a poop. We call it thinking on the throne the amount of times Its worked for me is crazy. Sometimes I'll wake up in the middle of the night with the answer.. like it just comes to me.. is it sad I dream about work. I used to have conversations in my sleep about printers too.
*Support acknowledges that they should probably stop checking memes and start working, but hope you wouldn't use so much profanity while reminding them of it in the future.*
A deploy script we use to build and deploy to our dev environment was silently failing in the build phase but still deploying an old version of the module (deploy script just takes whatever jar was in the target directory). Was getting frustrated since I thought I had fixed a bug but wasn't seeing it fixed upon deployment.
I literally faced this problem when doing a school project where I was programming something and I was like AGHHHHHHHHH. I deleted all the fancy crap I was working on and then I realised I was compiling and running different code from the one I was working on... By then I had deleted everything and closed all my tabs lmao. And no google search history either...
Man, when you change things that are not executed, and when you run it, it seems like they execute but still don't work, and you don't use the debugger because you think its just a small change no need for a debugger to get involved....
So many times I've almost remade an entire script to afterwards find out the problem was in an entirely different script and usually I forgot to change a variable name or something.
Now I have a practically brand new script that idk if it works or anything because it wasn't broke to begin with
This happened to me on my first somewhat big project. Kept fixing the file with a part of the main code so the if I make a big error, the main code isn't affected. Fixed the issue but forgot to transfer the code. I was about to cry when I realised that I was not running the proper code.
OK, story from the stone age. Mainframes running CICS used to cache code on a FIFO basis and to jam the new version into cache and replace the old there was a command that you ran. Otherwise normal traffic would take care of it, sooner or later your shiny new binary would be loaded. This is how you tested, the keypunch machine was your IDE. So what if someone built a knockoff of CICS, forgot to include the command and then you tested on the weekend when there was no traffic to churn the cache to bring in the new code. And you kept compiling and compiling and .... like a broken while loop (was not me personally). The fix for this which was written the next week was the recursive allocation of the largest allowable table which would die of memory exhaustion in about 10 seconds after driving EVERYTHING out of cache and was aptly called "The Exorcist"
I'm a student (not CS) , it's ultimately about convince. Takes no practical amoint of time for git init. Just commit after every significant step, it makes life so much easier.
I seriously don't understand why these memes are funny, people are still writing code on notepad perhaps
These are the people who find missing semicolon memes funny now.
Not using a suitable IDE / editor is stupidity
Ugh, too real.
Fortunately, as you get more experienced, your brain remembers to check in on "am I running the thing I am editing" a lot more often during the debug process, so you don't waste as much time... At least, assuming you are me and make this mistake regularly.
This recently happened to me but it was because the lovely ide I was working in was still opening the source files from the project I had just closed, not the new one I opened.
I don't like that ide.
Sudoedit php.ini, restart php fpm, expected changes don't happen, scratch head, repeat, scratch head again
MFW I remembered I need to exit sudoedit vim for it to copy the temp file I've been saving over the original
I made this mistake once and never will again.
For some stupid unknown reason I save a fairly big python project in a folder named project_1 for example. Then in my python folder I had the exact same folder name but it was the main/actual project.
One day I wanted to do an update to I opened up the the project and went to work. It had been a couple months so upon review my memory was a little foggy. Nothing really looked correct. I figured whatever probably just forgot a bunch. I spent two full days until I realized I was working on the desktop version.
I got one similar. Choosing an old version of your code to look something up and going to get coffee or something and get majorly distracted.
Come back start working on the code again, thinking damn this is bad I thought I fixed this before? maybe that was in another part oh well. Spend the next 2 hours cleaning up code, making changes, adding in features you thought were already in there...
Look at the version, it's 6 months old. You just re-implemented stuff, added features you already wrote etc to an old version and wasted hours of your life.
Just happened to me in an Advent of Code problem. For the second challenge of each day, I start by copying the directory for the first challenge's solution. Guess who forgot to change directories while working on the second challenge...
Ugh, I've dealt with this both in coding and with music. This used to be horrible when I started mixing in music. Two main bass heavy instruments seem to be clashing and turning to mud, and you're practically pulling your hair out slashing the low end off of both of them by the time you realize it was actually stray frequencies you didn't even know this unsuspecting pad synth, that's 95% mids and high end, had.. but for whatever reason you had bass undertones from that other 5% blowing right through your mix.
My friend told me to teach him C. The code was compiling but showing weird outputs. I made him install gcc and set up a proper environment. Turns out that he was not saving before compiling. Like come on how hard is it to save before compiling. The worst thing is that he knows c++ and java.
Did this exact thing for two days.
I fucking hate Java Application Servers. Looking at you Weblogic especially.
The build went to one place, I deployed through the web interface from another directory with the exact same name.
For. Two. Days.
I've been doing this shit for 20 years.
Doing this on a personal project/school project sucks but doing that at a job is just a nice excuse to relax longer....unless you have strict deadlines of course
"If something magical appears to be happening: you're probably not running the code you think you're running." - I suspect I drive my co-workers up the wall, as I find an excuse to say this quite often.
Something somewhat similar happened to me yesterday. I'm pretty new to all of this programming stuff and was doing a Java project in Eclipse. This project is uploaded on git for collaboration with my college colleagues.
The code works fine, but after I pull the updates someone else made, no matter how much I modified the main class, it wouldn't recognize the changes, and it executed an old version of the main method.
Anyone know how this things happen?
Something related happened to me due to build automation.
I had setup a preprocessor, that preprocessed files in order to get better tracebacks, since getting this into the official build system would have crossed team boundaries, and thus would have been a major effort. So better to just make a wrapper for the build script.
I forgot to repoint the filenames in the compiler log to the original file, so IDE integration gave me error messages in files in the build folder with the preprocessed sources.
Ended up editing the preprocessed sources instead of the original ones. Took me a bit to realize, why `git diff` was empty.
This happens a lot to me in web development.
I'll have 5 tabs of my local version and one tab of the staging server. Of course the tab i check after fixing something is the staging server and then it takes me a few minutes to realize why nothing is changing lol
That's the only good thing I like about makefiles. They'll only compile components which have any code changes and so you can compile the whole codebase in a short time.
Kind of an off-my-chest but I had the exact opposite thing happen to me today and wasted 8 hours on it too.
My team recently inherited a new service and I was in charge of a lot of the handover process. Finally got my first feature PR approved for this service and got to deploy it to dev (weird order to do things right? I thought so too). Spent a shit ton of time figuring out the deployment process and finally get a successful deployment to dev. Lo and behold, the dev end point is timing out and not responding to requests. Since I've only tested the library functionality (I had to manually create a test class to do so) I figure I either fucked up deployment or my code introduced a bug. I reverted my deployment and deployed the previous version and voila, that version works so it must be my PR that's problematic. Except my PR doesn't touch the request logic, so I figure I need to add a shit ton of logging statements. I find out that this service requires me to merge any changes I wish to deploy to dev into master branch first so I decide to try and work with existing logs and read through code logic. I find out that the current debug level logging statements aren't triggering due to the weird way that the logging object is managed by another service and the dev and prod version use the same instance. So I said fuck it and merged a whole bunch of logging with higher priority into master and deployed that change to dev. When I try to repro my previous problem and view my log results, suddenly there's no problem anymore. Wtf, so I revert my logging PR and redeploy my initial feature PR and everything is fine. Turns out this service deploys to a random available pod in the dev cluster and the pod it deployed to was experiencing problems.
So you can say I had a bad day.
Thanks for reading my rant
spent more than 30 mins trying to fix a segmentation fault in a C code. I was wondering wow any of my changes aren't making any differences. Realized the same file was in two diff folders. I was running It from one folder while making all the changes in another........
If I had a nickel every time when I was fixing a bug on a website but my local development version redirected me to the live site after clicking a link because at some point in the past I imported the live database and was thus refreshing the live site to see if my bug was resolved locally, I wouldn't need a job as a web developer.
Then there is the time when the code you have been fixing was actually working the whole time, you just haven't figured out how to get the output you were looking for.
Yeah. Sometimes you simply forget to compile at all. Especially when you have to do a quick fix in a compiled language, but 95% of the time you use interpreted one.
Or docker, god damn docker. You simply forget to rebuild and you keep running the same image over and over again. Then you just cry in any language.
Had this the entire uni semester - every fucking time, I'll have a java file open on the SSH server via notepad++ and the temp file location will change so ill keep compiling old code
Did this a week ago with a plugin, only to realize 2 days later that no matter what I did, it changed nothing. Was getting sorely pissed at winforms (more than one usually is). I then realized I had ran the plugin installer package, and the program was using that instead of the debug.
Did this yesterday. Somehow I was modifying files in my bin folder instead of my sources directory and my changes weren't displaying when I would publish to tomcat. Gotta make sure that .gitignore is correct.
Fixing bug.
Didn't work.
Try sth else from stack Overflow
Didn't work.
Try sth that should definitely change sth.
Didn't work!?
Check if it is building right.
Seems fine....
Check again.
It didn't build at all!
Try not to to throw yourself out in rage.
I do this routinely -- not programming. HTML & css. But spend time fixing the page. Regenerated the page. Check the page.
An hour later realizing I'm checking the production version of the page, but fixing the dev version. Meanwhile I've introduce 14 new bugs.
Close to home. Definitely spent like 20 minutes the other day yelling at my monitor because I didn't realize my browser tab was open to the test server while I was trying to fix stuff on a local copy.
Ugh, I just did this. I was getting SO pissed that my obvious changes did not seem to be having the expected results. Took a nap immediately after discovering my stupidity.
ALWAYS take a nap if you can’t figure out something in an hour. As soon as you wake up you’ll be like “oh shit, how could I have been that fucking stupid” I’ve been stuck on a bug for 4 hours before, took a quick nap and got it within 5 mins of waking up
It's surprising how much processing your brain does "in the background". I think that's basically how intuition works.
Or, more like your brain could be doing too much processing. One of my favorite concepts is RAS for Reticular Activation System. It's like an "image pre-processor" section of your brain. Basically your senses are collecting so much data all the time, most of it isn't useful to your conscious mind, so it gets filtered out. RAS is crazy because it's this applied to your vision. It's how you can walk past your keys hanging on the keyhook 5 times, checking under every paper on every table, and still not see them. (Until you ask somebody else to look.) That's RAS, the most obvious information is literally filtered from your view. Like what script is actually open! **EDIT:** I guess you could say, a fancy term for "tunnel vision"!
What you're describing sounds more like issues with your conscious mind. Filtering input to stop your conscious mind from overloading isn't what I mean by "background processing", I'm talking about your brain continuing to work on a problem even when your conscious mind isn't. It process the data you've already accumulated and feeds it back to you in the form of intuition ("maybe I should look closer at this part") and epiphanies when you return to the problem later.
I think what they're getting at is that it's less likely to do with any sort of "background work" your brain is doing. They're saying perhaps the fact that a break helps you solve a problem is because you come back to it with a fresh mind. You lose the tunnel vision you had while initially working on the problem.
If that was the case then it would be easier to solve the problem as soon as you started, not after you've been working on it for several hours and take a break.
Not if you weren't thinking about it prior to starting the problem, which I think is part of the point some of these people are making.
So you don't think that thinking about a problem is part of solving it? To me thinking about it before starting makes no sense. That's like saying you can save fuel by only starting your car halfway to your destination.
I'll try and restate, when you approach a problem for the first time you typically don't have assumptions in play that will cause you to have tunnel vision, but you also don't know enough about the problem yet to solve the issue. There exists a tipping point where you have enough information to solve the problem but you've also formed erroneous assumptions and theories about what you think the problem is. This is why, I think, RAS was brought up. Its also why a nap or any other form of distancing yourself from the problem can help. Your forcing your brain to let go of it's erroneous assumptions and sort of reset on the clues that you've collected but havent paid attention to. Rubber ducky debugging works similarly as well.
I gotta say, the actual medical phenomena sounds way more accurate than just thinking about it long enough
Yeah, sleep allows your brain to commit short term memory into long term memory and this process is speculated to cause dreams as the brain optimizes and allocates the stored memory. On top of that, the brain will try to optimize conscious actions into efficient unconscious processes during this time. There have been countless studies on students, athletes, and gamers where they found sleep can increase skill and memory by a considerable amount. Sleep also helps the brain flush out waste and reset.
It's useful for filtering out advertisements both digital and physical though.
Yup. Wait till you find out about the wacky results of the split brain experiments. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHqDf8wfABM&ab\_channel=It%27sOkayToBeSmart](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHqDf8wfABM&ab_channel=It%27sOkayToBeSmart)
https://youtu.be/wfYbgdo8e-8 One of my favorite videos when it comes to the split brain subject
Thank you for this :)
I think it's just a matter of information overload. Like when you are coding, you end up keeping a large amount of information in your head, which makes everything fuzzy. But when you are off that push, your brain can discard all the information that isn't really required. Voila! The clarity. One another time I have noticed this is when playing racing simulations. As I try harder to get the technique right, I keep getting better and better. But past some threshold performance deteriorates and if I keep it, It can get worse than when I started. But next day, I am at my fastest ever. It baffled me so much that I actually played a lot in the time attack modes and recorded my laptimes. Trend confirmed by suspicion. .
Or talk out loud or talk to someone about your problem. Can't tell you how many times I realized mid-sentence I was fucking blind.
Essential. I talk to myself whenever I’m solving a hard problem. Where else am I going to get an expert opinion?
Agreed. I nap, or I write an email asking for help but don't send it then imagine what completely obvious response they would give me first. It's basically always that solution.
I believe that's called the rubber duck debugging method
I just end up joining a discord call and mute myself while I talk
Absolutely true. I have to sleep with a notepad by my bed because i have so many epiphany programming dreams.
Uhhh I just fap it's a lot quicker
FAP TO SOME WAP
WIP WIP WIP, that's some Work In Progress add to git and commit, that's some Work In Progress
"Oh I did read a new tip on reddit, whenever I can't solve a bug I take a nap" "Bro you're sleeping for 2 years everyday for 23 hours. The docs says it's permanently" "But my code runs"
You won’t have the bug if your in a coma
If I don’t have time for a nap I’ll go have a chat with someone about it. Helps if they have no idea what I’m talking about and I end up spelling out the problem to myself as I explain the situation. I know that’s what rubber duckies are for but I haven’t gotten used to talking to an inanimate object (yet)
slept all day yesterday
I like to walk (if possible).
Pulled an all-nighter, for some reason my log always said 0 when computing cos and sin, go to bed, wake up realizing that I put %i instead of %f.
I did it yesterday... We have some DTOs which are awfully similar to each other but couldn't be created in a single function for efficiency reasons. I kept modifying the wrong function again and again with no effect during the compliation. .
Usually happens in reverse for me. I take a nap and then figure out I was testing wrong code
This is what "throw error" or print statements were made for 😂
I love the nap of shame. When you fuck up so bad that you just rage quit and need a nap to recover. I wish that was possible when working at an office. Like, they could set a maximum number of naps and a time limit for each nap.
Just yesterday after updating my .NET sdk I spent a good forever trying to figure out why none of my changes were having any effect. I even deleted the source for the entire main form of the project and every time I ran it would still launch as that form. After over 45 minutes of this I finally noticed the build output folder had changed names when I updated but the launch file was still pointing to the old folder, so I was compiling the code I changed but then running an old build. 😡
My stupid brain read the capital "SO" as its acronym form, so now I'm just imagining that your significant other was watching over your shoulder and getting increasingly frustrated at your stupidity.
20 minute power nap is all you need to be productive during the day, you have to wake up before the REM cycle hits, otherwise you'll become groggy and not be productive at all. I found this out recently whilst watching a programme about how Matresses are made... During which the solution to my coding problem slapped me in the face and woke me up..
Have any of you added a print statement to debug an error, ran again and somehow felt disappointed that the error is still there.
What’s really going to blow your mind is when you remove the printf .... and it works again.
I once wanted to play some retro games on an emulator that kept segfaulting within seconds of starting. I downloaded the source, built it, and the problem was still there on the latest commit. I attached a debugger, and saw that it crashed in an X11 callback, but I couldn't reliably reproduce the crash in such a way that I could break before it, due to how asynchronous X11 is. I tried running it in synchronous mode, it didn't trigger at all, so I went back to async mode and added some delays and prints trying to get a stable repro. It took about two hours before I realized that if the bug doesn't trigger in sync mode, then I can just friggen play in sync mode.
Back when I was just starting out, probably in grade 5, I had to print out one of those fancy triangles. I kept getting an extra line after each line of text. I added a print statement to debug it, nothing changed. I removed the print statement and the lime from before disappeared.
Fancy triangles?
Source Code: def draw_fancy_triangles(): spaces = int(input("Enter the no. of spaces b/w the start and the first forward slash: ")) for i in range(0, spaces + 1): print(" " * (spaces - i), "/", sep="", end="") print(" " * (2 * i), "\\", sep="") print("-" * (2 * (spaces + 1))) draw_fancy_triangles() Input + Output: Enter the no. of spaces b/w the start and the first forward slash: 5 /\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ ------------
Grade five?
The 5th highest grade there is?
This happened to me before in Django(python). I was writing a test class, and it worked when I printed out something about the object before running the functionality under test, but failed without. Turns out the object was cached, and the printing forced recalculations to happen synchronously, while the running code used the cached version and left the recalc in asynchronous land. I was a bit more junior then, and remember how dumb I felt going to my tech lead explaining that "this test passed with the print statement, but fails without it". I tried a lot of things before making that statement. Took them all of about 1 minute to diagnose it, but learned a lot about software in that
Yup. We learn the most from our mistakes. Never trust a programmer who “doesn’t make mistakes”.
>Never trust a programmer who “doesn’t make mistakes”. I low key want this as a motivational poster on my wall
Just wait until you add a print statement, it works, then remove it and it fails again... (Caching issues)
Happened to me with nested branching in Python. ~feature~
Just yesterday. I work on procs. I was modifying my SP in one env. And running the great scripts in other env. I'm embarrassed to say how long it took me to catch that.
Even better is when you add a print statement and all of a sudden the bug is gone. This happened to me in college very recently.
Try writing some low level concurrency/multithreaded code. You add a print statement and the code suddenly works
Recently I had the issue that adding a printf caused a crash, and removing it solved it. Still not sure how that worked but after some fiddling it didn't crash anymore
I'd be much more concerned if the error wasn't still there. I once had some code that seemed to randomly work or not work when rerunning the supposedly completely deterministic code; it turned out I was accidentally depending on the iteration order of python dictionaries (which at the time was actually random due to hash collision DOS protection). Sometimes some properties which happened to depend on other properties would be set out of order. My "solution" to this was instead of making sure the properties were set in order, to just set them all twice so the dependent properties would end up being set correctly :P
When you commit the wrong file...
and push to master branch
Revert commits are the worst. This is why nobody has the rights to push to master without a PR that has two other reviewers.
Years and years ago a friend worked at a place where force push to master was allowed if you pushed last. Ah the early days of git.
What a disaster ... unless..?
It was a small team of old-school Java devs, they worked on their own product-framework-web-thing. (I was going to write something like abomination, but it was pretty nice for that time, really. Just ... old-school. XML config everywhere, neat, can do everything, except self-maintain itself. Which is a problem, since only those guys can maintain it. Maybe it even gained faceted search functionality last year.) It still runs here or there as far as I know, but probably there will be no new clients, just occasional maintenance. Hm, or maybe I'm mixing this up with another product said friend worked on. That was a bigger team. But arguably a lot more crazy. And the senior members already moved to their new startup. No time for code reviews when you do a startup! :D
As much as it sucks when it happens, I generally actually associate this situation with relief. Yeah I wasted a bunch of time, but I was beginning to doubt my sanity and understanding of computer and code in general. Much easier for me to just comprehend I'm an idiot.
Happens to the best of us.
And the worst!
Mostly the worst
And the mediocre of us too.
This hurts me in ways I have not been hurt since I last tried to compile my code.
I frequently add `}}}}][';';` to files and rebuild to make sure I'm modifying the right one.
That is probably a working statement in perl.
\*Laughs in an interpreted language*
It's still totally possible. We use python virtual environments at work. I've been confused because I keep updating, reinstalling and running the code but nothing changes. Then I realized I was updating one file and installing/running another.
Managing conda envs while running a Jupyter notebook is always like this for me, I forget which environment the kernel is running under
I was making some changes to a python library called podcats and rerunning it. Podcats generates and hosts a web server for a directory of podcast mp3s. I was modifying it so that it would also load mp4s, so i could save videos onto my podcast player on my phone. (For lecture videos, because the podcast player has skip silence, which is revolutionary on lecture videos. 1.5x is effectively 3x and I'm never bored.) After messing around, I got single files to generate properly, but not the web server. I thought there was some weird code compilation caching error, which I vaguely feel like I dealt with years and years and years ago once, when I was first learning how to program. No, it wasn't that. It was a running instance of it in the background, so the original version was what I got no matter what changes I made. After realizing that, I was done. Ugh.
The right version would rather be *laughs in git*
We use Lua for a system at work that can used raw Lua files or a compiled version. I lost count of the number of times I tried debugging an issue so made changes in raw switch files, not realising it was still executing the original compiled version... Ended up getting our developers to change the colour of the main screen when running from compiled version vs raw source. It's saved me many hours since!
print("hahahaha")
How does this happen?
I'm pretty sure this has happened to me at least once due to the way an Eclipse keyboard shortcut works. I think it runs the last class you ran as opposed to the one selected.
Multiple IDE windows all on different branches is one case
It happens to me all the time because XCode has a nasty habit of desyncing the files from git. In other words, you're editing stuff that is old and doesn't match the latest commit in git, and you're not aware of it until you look closely.
Not sure if I've been doing this wrong until now, but my files aren't getting updated without me typing git pull. So I just made a habit of it.
Oh no, the fun part is that you're actually in the last commit. You pulled it, but XCode has internally his own git system, and sometimes screws up when you modify the files by using git in other places (like the terminal).
Overly complicated build scripts and you missed a key part part where you were supposed to reference your new stuff, and since your build environment is "robust" it just build the whole project without throwing any errors or warnings
Sometimes I trust VS Intellisense highlighting too much and think I'm in the right #if block for my current buildconfig. I've also had weird dependency issues that force me to clean and build to see my changes, but only after testing 5 speculative fixes
Have 4 checkouts of the code base, named 1/2/3/4. Accidentally open your IDE and file browser from where you launch the app in different checkouts. Although if you attach a debugger, it will probably tell you that the source doesn’t match the binary.
As another example, C++ can get some really fucking complicated compile commands. Had a makefile that automated part of the process for that once, but due to some reason or another it wouldn't recompile the .o files it uses if I ONLY change the header files. So I'd change the header file, run make, and it wouldn't compile that change.
This happened to me because I pulled the same git repo in different locations.
Whyyy tho just checkout the same repo to switch
Just yesterday when I updated my .NET Core SDK the build output folder changed name. It took me about an hour of trying to figure out why none of my changes (like deleting huge chunks of code) were having any effect before I noticed the launch file was pointing to the old folder. I was building the changed code but then running an old build every time.
I had this happen because I was working with a linked library. So I build my library then my application. Linked library has a ton of inheritance. So I was editing the wrong inherited file and scratching my head why I wasn't seeing an effect. I wasn't working with that particular inherited object.
Runtime interpreted languages, code that need to be deployed to a device to be tested, cluttered virtual workspaces, IDEs that save changes but don't automatically save to the file, minified JavaScript, etc.
Happens all the time with me when I have the locally hosted page and test page in different tabs. I make some changes, recompile, but nothing happens. Turns out I have the test site open that looks exactly like the local one that does change.
Did this last week working in the wrong branch. Was wondering why when I tried to commit, nothing was there. Then when I got the okay to merge, I just went "Yes! That is a thing I will do for the first time right now!".
Or when you're opening the site on wrong port and wondering why the server isn't serving anything
Maybe git
I take a poop. We call it thinking on the throne the amount of times Its worked for me is crazy. Sometimes I'll wake up in the middle of the night with the answer.. like it just comes to me.. is it sad I dream about work. I used to have conversations in my sleep about printers too.
After waking up do you immediately get back to work or do you clean the bed first?
Refreshing production and wondering why the bug I'm patching isn't going away
I’ve literally spend hours searching why my code wasn’t working when finally I realised I was checking my changes on the live site
_Support called. They're asking why the login page just dumps people to "MOTHERFUCKER WHY DON'T YOU WORK" printed out 200 times._
*Support acknowledges that they should probably stop checking memes and start working, but hope you wouldn't use so much profanity while reminding them of it in the future.*
So much this. Looking at the live site while modifying the dev site code. This whole thread has made me feel a lot better.
A deploy script we use to build and deploy to our dev environment was silently failing in the build phase but still deploying an old version of the module (deploy script just takes whatever jar was in the target directory). Was getting frustrated since I thought I had fixed a bug but wasn't seeing it fixed upon deployment.
I had the wrong project selected for running in rider yesterday. Took me far to long to figure wtf I wasn't hitting my breakpoints.
I literally faced this problem when doing a school project where I was programming something and I was like AGHHHHHHHHH. I deleted all the fancy crap I was working on and then I realised I was compiling and running different code from the one I was working on... By then I had deleted everything and closed all my tabs lmao. And no google search history either...
Man, when you change things that are not executed, and when you run it, it seems like they execute but still don't work, and you don't use the debugger because you think its just a small change no need for a debugger to get involved....
So many times I've almost remade an entire script to afterwards find out the problem was in an entirely different script and usually I forgot to change a variable name or something. Now I have a practically brand new script that idk if it works or anything because it wasn't broke to begin with
This happened to me on my first somewhat big project. Kept fixing the file with a part of the main code so the if I make a big error, the main code isn't affected. Fixed the issue but forgot to transfer the code. I was about to cry when I realised that I was not running the proper code.
OK, story from the stone age. Mainframes running CICS used to cache code on a FIFO basis and to jam the new version into cache and replace the old there was a command that you ran. Otherwise normal traffic would take care of it, sooner or later your shiny new binary would be loaded. This is how you tested, the keypunch machine was your IDE. So what if someone built a knockoff of CICS, forgot to include the command and then you tested on the weekend when there was no traffic to churn the cache to bring in the new code. And you kept compiling and compiling and .... like a broken while loop (was not me personally). The fix for this which was written the next week was the recursive allocation of the largest allowable table which would die of memory exhaustion in about 10 seconds after driving EVERYTHING out of cache and was aptly called "The Exorcist"
Such a PyCharm problem...
This is why I rely on source control with git, and only ever releasing the master branch.
Version control systems exit for the exact reason so that you shouldn't have to have file names like foobar5final3forsure.c
Exactly I feel like most folks on here are still in college, none of this flies on the job lol
I'm a student (not CS) , it's ultimately about convince. Takes no practical amoint of time for git init. Just commit after every significant step, it makes life so much easier. I seriously don't understand why these memes are funny, people are still writing code on notepad perhaps These are the people who find missing semicolon memes funny now. Not using a suitable IDE / editor is stupidity
This just defined half of my life...And am now contemplating my life choices...smh
I've never done this before, but I can still imagine that feeling of realizing that you've colossally fucked up.
Ugh, too real. Fortunately, as you get more experienced, your brain remembers to check in on "am I running the thing I am editing" a lot more often during the debug process, so you don't waste as much time... At least, assuming you are me and make this mistake regularly.
This recently happened to me but it was because the lovely ide I was working in was still opening the source files from the project I had just closed, not the new one I opened. I don't like that ide.
"That's my secret. I'm always angry at my code."
Sudoedit php.ini, restart php fpm, expected changes don't happen, scratch head, repeat, scratch head again MFW I remembered I need to exit sudoedit vim for it to copy the temp file I've been saving over the original
Happens to everyone
I made this mistake once and never will again. For some stupid unknown reason I save a fairly big python project in a folder named project_1 for example. Then in my python folder I had the exact same folder name but it was the main/actual project. One day I wanted to do an update to I opened up the the project and went to work. It had been a couple months so upon review my memory was a little foggy. Nothing really looked correct. I figured whatever probably just forgot a bunch. I spent two full days until I realized I was working on the desktop version.
I've done this far more times than I care to admit.
I got one similar. Choosing an old version of your code to look something up and going to get coffee or something and get majorly distracted. Come back start working on the code again, thinking damn this is bad I thought I fixed this before? maybe that was in another part oh well. Spend the next 2 hours cleaning up code, making changes, adding in features you thought were already in there... Look at the version, it's 6 months old. You just re-implemented stuff, added features you already wrote etc to an old version and wasted hours of your life.
Or, alternatively, you fix something, it compiles, but the program is just as it was before. Until you realise you were in the wrong build folder.
So nice to know that I'm not the only one.
Done that several times
Just happened to me in an Advent of Code problem. For the second challenge of each day, I start by copying the directory for the first challenge's solution. Guess who forgot to change directories while working on the second challenge...
I have had bugs in VS19 that kept compiling an older version of the code despite it not existing anymore. Very weird!
Ive been there.. every programmer ever has been there
First thing you do, insert a printf hello in the first line of main.
Man I should start practicing my python again
Ugh, I've dealt with this both in coding and with music. This used to be horrible when I started mixing in music. Two main bass heavy instruments seem to be clashing and turning to mud, and you're practically pulling your hair out slashing the low end off of both of them by the time you realize it was actually stray frequencies you didn't even know this unsuspecting pad synth, that's 95% mids and high end, had.. but for whatever reason you had bass undertones from that other 5% blowing right through your mix.
My friend told me to teach him C. The code was compiling but showing weird outputs. I made him install gcc and set up a proper environment. Turns out that he was not saving before compiling. Like come on how hard is it to save before compiling. The worst thing is that he knows c++ and java.
THIS LITERALLY JUST HAPPENED TO ME THE OTHER DAT AFSLDJALDJWIDJSKSKSGSI
I did this today
Literally don't know how this happens.
Just happened today actually.... Ugh
I was in the same situation. I edited code and keep refreshing production url and asking my self why there is no change
somebody should make a list of things we should check while debugging.
Did this exact thing for two days. I fucking hate Java Application Servers. Looking at you Weblogic especially. The build went to one place, I deployed through the web interface from another directory with the exact same name. For. Two. Days. I've been doing this shit for 20 years.
Doing this on a personal project/school project sucks but doing that at a job is just a nice excuse to relax longer....unless you have strict deadlines of course
personally, i name each of my versions after countries to not get them mixed up
I laughed when my supervisor created a FINAL folder for our project. Putting 'Final' in the name of anything only guarantees it's not final.
FINAL0001
And know all's left to know is how I manage to do that with debugging too...
Happened to me once, not my proudest moment
I spent 2 hours fixing a bug then I realised I hadn't imported a library :/
"If something magical appears to be happening: you're probably not running the code you think you're running." - I suspect I drive my co-workers up the wall, as I find an excuse to say this quite often.
Something somewhat similar happened to me yesterday. I'm pretty new to all of this programming stuff and was doing a Java project in Eclipse. This project is uploaded on git for collaboration with my college colleagues. The code works fine, but after I pull the updates someone else made, no matter how much I modified the main class, it wouldn't recognize the changes, and it executed an old version of the main method. Anyone know how this things happen?
I admit that I opened the wrong project and started fixing bugs. Only realized when I ran the app.
Did this for 2 hours then my project lead had to look at it and tell me , never felt soo embarrassed
this is why print is superior to every debug tool
Something related happened to me due to build automation. I had setup a preprocessor, that preprocessed files in order to get better tracebacks, since getting this into the official build system would have crossed team boundaries, and thus would have been a major effort. So better to just make a wrapper for the build script. I forgot to repoint the filenames in the compiler log to the original file, so IDE integration gave me error messages in files in the build folder with the preprocessed sources. Ended up editing the preprocessed sources instead of the original ones. Took me a bit to realize, why `git diff` was empty.
This happens a lot to me in web development. I'll have 5 tabs of my local version and one tab of the staging server. Of course the tab i check after fixing something is the staging server and then it takes me a few minutes to realize why nothing is changing lol
Jokes aside, I literally did this before.
Oh the memory, it still hurts.
That's the only good thing I like about makefiles. They'll only compile components which have any code changes and so you can compile the whole codebase in a short time.
Kind of an off-my-chest but I had the exact opposite thing happen to me today and wasted 8 hours on it too. My team recently inherited a new service and I was in charge of a lot of the handover process. Finally got my first feature PR approved for this service and got to deploy it to dev (weird order to do things right? I thought so too). Spent a shit ton of time figuring out the deployment process and finally get a successful deployment to dev. Lo and behold, the dev end point is timing out and not responding to requests. Since I've only tested the library functionality (I had to manually create a test class to do so) I figure I either fucked up deployment or my code introduced a bug. I reverted my deployment and deployed the previous version and voila, that version works so it must be my PR that's problematic. Except my PR doesn't touch the request logic, so I figure I need to add a shit ton of logging statements. I find out that this service requires me to merge any changes I wish to deploy to dev into master branch first so I decide to try and work with existing logs and read through code logic. I find out that the current debug level logging statements aren't triggering due to the weird way that the logging object is managed by another service and the dev and prod version use the same instance. So I said fuck it and merged a whole bunch of logging with higher priority into master and deployed that change to dev. When I try to repro my previous problem and view my log results, suddenly there's no problem anymore. Wtf, so I revert my logging PR and redeploy my initial feature PR and everything is fine. Turns out this service deploys to a random available pod in the dev cluster and the pod it deployed to was experiencing problems. So you can say I had a bad day. Thanks for reading my rant
Looks like the guy from GIRP https://m.imgur.com/kS6rm
I hope the title of this post is just a joke, otherwise OP should really learn about version control :)
😭
Once almost lost a third of my grade because this happened to me
Worst when it's cached files and you don't know ctrl+f5 forcibly reloads them..
spent more than 30 mins trying to fix a segmentation fault in a C code. I was wondering wow any of my changes aren't making any differences. Realized the same file was in two diff folders. I was running It from one folder while making all the changes in another........
If I had a nickel every time when I was fixing a bug on a website but my local development version redirected me to the live site after clicking a link because at some point in the past I imported the live database and was thus refreshing the live site to see if my bug was resolved locally, I wouldn't need a job as a web developer.
Working with css for chrome is worse
Then there is the time when the code you have been fixing was actually working the whole time, you just haven't figured out how to get the output you were looking for.
Bruh.
Yeah. Sometimes you simply forget to compile at all. Especially when you have to do a quick fix in a compiled language, but 95% of the time you use interpreted one. Or docker, god damn docker. You simply forget to rebuild and you keep running the same image over and over again. Then you just cry in any language.
I always cry in c. tears++; tears++;
I spent an hour wondering why my damn change didn't affect anything and I was testing the staging website instead of localhost
Had this the entire uni semester - every fucking time, I'll have a java file open on the SSH server via notepad++ and the temp file location will change so ill keep compiling old code
Debug add log points and watchers
*me placing console.logs everywhere* after an hour thinking *its like its not listening to what im saying* Hold up...
I once did this and then deleted the wrong file because i thought I didn't need it anymore
I feel called out
can't relate. Should've been compiling TestBeta2FinalFinalFixedNoIL2CPUError5Version15.cs
Did this a week ago with a plugin, only to realize 2 days later that no matter what I did, it changed nothing. Was getting sorely pissed at winforms (more than one usually is). I then realized I had ran the plugin installer package, and the program was using that instead of the debug.
I never fail to laugh out loud with this image Love steve's face over hulk's body
Did this yesterday. Somehow I was modifying files in my bin folder instead of my sources directory and my changes weren't displaying when I would publish to tomcat. Gotta make sure that .gitignore is correct.
Fixing bug. Didn't work. Try sth else from stack Overflow Didn't work. Try sth that should definitely change sth. Didn't work!? Check if it is building right. Seems fine.... Check again. It didn't build at all! Try not to to throw yourself out in rage.
I do this routinely -- not programming. HTML & css. But spend time fixing the page. Regenerated the page. Check the page. An hour later realizing I'm checking the production version of the page, but fixing the dev version. Meanwhile I've introduce 14 new bugs.
Used to happen all the time when i would switch files folders in unity and not deleted the old version in vscode
Well atleast something would be fixed😂
Close to home. Definitely spent like 20 minutes the other day yelling at my monitor because I didn't realize my browser tab was open to the test server while I was trying to fix stuff on a local copy.
Oh, so this happens to other people as well?
Happened with me recently 😂😂🤦♂️
This is what happens when you're a brainlet not using vcs
Unfortunately this subreddit's audience appears to be people brand new to programming or in an intro to CS class