This reminds me of my first job at a very small shop. Here’s two stories: The calendar table struck a chord. We had one for holidays. One system needed to know

This reminds me of my first job at a very small shop. Here’s two stories: The calendar table struck a chord. We had one for holidays. One system needed to know when they were to calculate pay dates. Except once a year it would “run out” and someone would have to go add in the next year’s worth after a bad calculation was spotted. The second time I was told to do it, I put in 10 years worth. The company didn’t survive long enough to need more. My first “big” project was actually that pay date code. Every once in a while the server would hang, and people had deduced the date calculation was the problem. But no one knew why. And it wasn’t frequent enough to be worth taking time from the other two programmers. But I was new and thus “spare”. After not being able to find any errors, I brute forced it. I ran that calculation for every day of the year for every pay type (weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, etc) and it quickly got locked in an infinite loop. Armed with the “bad” data that triggered it, it was easy to solve and provide tests to prove it would never happen again. I don’t remember what it was, exactly.