4 ms·

Because it isn't fun or exciting.

by gailees 13y ago

henrik_w 13y ago
What do you mean? It is both fun and exciting. It's like solving little mini-mysteries. Hmm, how come this variable is null here? That shouldn't be possible! But it is, so how did that happen? Mystery! You can also learn from it. Often a bug is caused by some misunderstanding, so figuring that out teaches you something. Here's an example where I learned several things finding and fixing a bug: http://henrikwarne.com/2014/01/27/a-bug-a-trace-a-test-a-twist/ http://henrikwarne.com/2014/01/27/a-bug-a-trace-a-test-a-twi...
- 72deluxe 13y ago
  It does teach you a lot. I spent ages wondering why my inherited class was blowing up on destruction in C++ - the parent destructor was not virtual and I was deleting the object using a pointer to the base type. So working this out has meant that there is a big burn mark in my brain to not do this again. Debugging really is good fun and helps with learning.
hobs 13y ago
Problem solving isnt fun or exciting? Sounds like you are doing it wrong.
d0 13y ago
Perhaps I'm sick in the mind but I really like debugging, especially hard ones. Recently our stack fell over when we did a production release. Basically web worker threads were spawning more worker threads and this crashed our AOP proxy (Castle.Core) which uses some global state and was spinlocking for some reason. We ended up with everything whacked at 100% across the cluster. 2 hours into the problem and it was something completely different - a for loop that didn't end on another thread and took up one core per node causing CPU contention. The spinlocks just amplified the problem. One change to the loop continuation clause and wham -- fixed. The journey is exciting and you learn so much on the way. It's great.
vonmoltke 13y ago
One of the best experiences of my engineering career was being on top of a 10-story sensor tower at midnight in a Seattle drizzle trying to get some custom sensor probes attached to a radar to work properly because we were chasing a very elusive but potentially catastrophic failure mode we didn't understand. Yeah, I'm a little... different.

Because it isn't fun or exciting.

by gailees 13y ago

Because it isn't fun or exciting.

What do you mean? It is both fun and exciting. It's like solving little mini-mysteries. Hmm, how come this variable is null here? That shouldn't be possible! But it is, so how did that happen? Mystery! You can also learn from it. Often a bug is caused by some misunderstanding, so figuring that out teaches you something. Here's an example where I learned several things finding and fixing a bug: http://henrikwarne.com/2014/01/27/a-bug-a-trace-a-test-a-twist/ http://henrikwarne.com/2014/01/27/a-bug-a-trace-a-test-a-twi...

72deluxe 13y ago
It does teach you a lot. I spent ages wondering why my inherited class was blowing up on destruction in C++ - the parent destructor was not virtual and I was deleting the object using a pointer to the base type. So working this out has meant that there is a big burn mark in my brain to not do this again. Debugging really is good fun and helps with learning.

hobs 13y ago

Problem solving isnt fun or exciting? Sounds like you are doing it wrong.

d0 13y ago

Perhaps I'm sick in the mind but I really like debugging, especially hard ones. Recently our stack fell over when we did a production release. Basically web worker threads were spawning more worker threads and this crashed our AOP proxy (Castle.Core) which uses some global state and was spinlocking for some reason. We ended up with everything whacked at 100% across the cluster. 2 hours into the problem and it was something completely different - a for loop that didn't end on another thread and took up one core per node causing CPU contention. The spinlocks just amplified the problem. One change to the loop continuation clause and wham -- fixed. The journey is exciting and you learn so much on the way. It's great.

vonmoltke 13y ago

One of the best experiences of my engineering career was being on top of a 10-story sensor tower at midnight in a Seattle drizzle trying to get some custom sensor probes attached to a radar to work properly because we were chasing a very elusive but potentially catastrophic failure mode we didn't understand. Yeah, I'm a little... different.