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I freely admit I'm defective. Software development is a constant cycle of solving problems and then solving the problems created by solving the previous problem

• sixdimensional 8y ago
  I am the same. In fact, there are whole classes of bugs that you overlook when you don’t consider it could be a stupid mistake that you, the programmer made. For example, if you’ve ever written a “perfectly good, you know it has to work piece of code” and spent hours trying to prove that the compiler is wrong, or some other crazy reason. If you are humble about it, you can more quickly accept that you might have made a mistake and possibly find it more quickly. This class of bug is, to me, the “it’s impossible for this code to break” type, where it really is impossible and you made an obvious mistake. In the rare cases where it is a serious problem and not your fault (also possible, but quite rare), it’s important to know how to do the hard work to debug deeply. A skilled programmer knows both how to trust their tools, question themselves, but also how to question, build or fix their tools if necessary. I think patience/persistence and confidence/humility gained through experience, combined with being creative, thoughtful, open-minded and somewhat of a perfectionist (but not completely one!) is what it takes to code.