3 ms·

Excellent 'obsessed detective' story

• hinkley 3y ago
  I used to think I was amazing at performance tuning and debugging but after working with a few hundred different people it turns out I’m just really fucking stubborn. I am not going to shrug at this bug again. You are going down. I do have a better way of processing concurrency information in my head, but the rest is just elbow grease. I had a friend in college who was dumb as a post but could study like nobody’s business. Some of us skated through, some of us earned our degree, but he really earned his. We became friends over computer games and for a long time I wondered if games and fiction were the only things we had in common. Turns out there’s maybe more to that story than I thought at the time.
  • allenrb 3y ago
    I think you’re absolutely right. Some of the things I’ve been most proud of have been products of stubbornly refusing to give up. On the other hand, some vast oceans of wasted time have been another result. It’s tricky to know when to be tenacious!
    • hinkley 3y ago
      In my defense, I am a strong proponent of refactoring to make all problems shallow. So there are classes of bug that I will see before anyone else because I move the related bits around and it becomes obvious that there are missing modes in the decision tree. I tend to believe that discipline and tenacity are separate traits. Often appearing in the same people, but different skills with different exercises.
      • allenrb 3y ago
        Bingo, that is very well put. Discipline is where I’ll tend to fall short. :-)
        • hinkley 3y ago
          Discipline is a funny word. Some of mine I’m very proud of, and some/many others don’t value it at all. But they sure tell me about how my behavior doesn’t align with their definition of discipline. I know when I leave projects, my ex coworkers defend my decisions. I’ve gotta be doing something right.