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If I died, I would have one regret.

I once worked in a code base whose messiness would make an oil spill in the fucking pacific ocean look like spilled milk on the floor in comparison.

Naturally, it had bugs. Oh BOY did it have bugs. Most of them were taken care of well enough. Or about as well as anyone insane enough to work in that code could.

There was just this one bug, which I still (un)fondly call "my bug of 2 years". It. Just. Didn't. Make. Sense.

It was written in JavaScript. Naturally. Which by itself, is the metaphorical programming language equivalent of a pile of horse manure. But this bug. It was the guano icing on top of the horse manure cake which is JavaScript.

I LITERALLY spent 2 years trying to find a solution. I woke up at night, thinking of explanations. I had dreams about fixing the damn thing. And I never did.

On the day I left the job, I had to pass it on to a friend (who hasn't solved the fucker yet either).

I hated that bug with all my heart. But..

Now that I think back, all the books I read, all the docs that I scoured, every non working fix I coded and every failed efforts I made on it, eventually made me a better programmer.

So cherish your bugs and issues. Sometimes, they come, not to hurt you, but to help you grow (unless you use JS, those bugs just wanna fuck you).

Comments
  • 6
    @oneinazillion13 Peer review doesn't magically solve everything. It was a problem in a very early version of Angular. Try debugging a framework with a peer review. I tried raising an issue but they stopped supporting it anyway.

    And for the record, there were probably around 15 people who tried their hand solving that.

    edit: To be more precise, it was a problem in the framework's digest loop rendering, in a fairly old browser, while interacting with another library. I'd probably need a peer review from God.
  • 2
    Once you die, you cant have regrets.
  • 1
    I love bugs which are no longer my problem 😄
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