In the hardware/embedded engineering world, this is what is known as The Moment. How long it takes for a developer to experience The Moment is correlated with

In the hardware/embedded engineering world, this is what is known as The Moment. How long it takes for a developer to experience The Moment is correlated with how closely they are to the metal. I'm not sure if it's the solder, the silicon, or the flux, but it seeps into your mind and slowly, but surely, The Moment will happen. The project is going swimingly well. Smoother than normal, actually. The calm before the storm. Suddenly, abruptly, your device fails. Maybe you were there, maybe someone else reported it; neither makes it less mysterious. You brush it off with more important things to do. It happens again. Now it bothers you; top priority. You try for hours to make it happen consistently. No amount of tin foil, bunny ears, or interpretive dance will make it happen again. So you give up, you start steel plating the code. Paranoid error checking everywhere, setting variables twice, resetting, extra padding on all the timing parameters. PARANOIA. You code begins to look like a lunatic wrote it. But the bug never happens again. Your paranoia and double guessing fixed the problem. The Moment! From then on, whenever something doesn't quite _feel_ right with your projects, you start inserting strange, almost ritualistic incantations in your code. If anyone asks why you decided to sleep for 14.23ms instead of the prescribed 10ms, you just call them a devil and run away back to your ancient cross compiling GCC and make a sacrifice to the Upstream Gods. I feel for the author. From that Moment on, his code will never be the same. His sanity, now left on the cutting room floor along with the trust he once had in Datasheets and Programming Manuals. Embedded 4 Life.