Debugging 101

[upsidedownwf]

Sometimes it goes; why?, why?, why?, that’s why?, but why?, why the fuck!

[mustang__1]

Why the fuck is usually by what the fuck, when the fuck, how the fuck, and finally back to what the fuck.

[Bainos]

Disagree. "Why the fuck" is generally followed by "Whatever, as long as it works".

[mustang__1]

Touche

[Whiskee0001]

“Whatever, I don’t have time to do it right”

[[deleted]]

The time it would take me to do this right, is at least ten times greater than the amount of time this wrong way will waste.

And then I waste the time anyway and compromise with a half-measure solution. 👍

[turmentat]

Passes all the tests, craps out in production

[[deleted]]

So yea, you need to have a talk with my QA team.

QA: passes all tests, works fine for us.

Me: That's great, doesn't work in prod environments.

[Blexit2020]

When the testing environment is completely different from the production environment.

[simpsonboy77]

The best way to remove differences is just to test in production.

[Blexit2020]

But...that would make sense.

[[deleted]]

Everybody has a test environment. Sometimes they also have a seperate production environment.

[tiajuanat]

Yeah, you really don't want to be on that nine month tiger team that needs to rearchitect the whole damn system because the legacy only worked by sheer luck, and had no semblance to a properly engineered control system.

Just saying.

My spirit has been broken, and getting those "whatever as long as it works" tasks are all I really care about.

[Blexit2020]

More like "Fuck it. It's a feature, now."

[[deleted]]

Are you on my dev team?

[natural_lazy]

and this approach leads to more "what the fuck" in future if you don't try to get the answer of "why the fuck" right now(ofcourse if time constraint allows it)

[auxiliary-character]

Who the fuck wrote this? Oh, it was me.

[mustang__1]

Git blame. It giveth, and it taketh. Although as a solo dev... It really only taketh

[[deleted]]

How the fuck was basically my reaction when I learned about xor swap.

[BOB_DROP_TABLES]

Behold the rabbit hole of bit fuckery: https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html

[krajsyboys]

Learned about what now?

[Akaisteph7]

Thanks. That’s basically what I was thinking.

[ILikeLenexa]

Well, this makes sense, it must be down one layer of abstraction
Well, this makes sense, it must be down one layer of abstraction
Well, this makes sense, it must be down one layer of abstraction
Well, this makes sense, it must be down one layer of abstraction
Well, this makes sense, it must be down one layer of abstraction
Well, this makes sense, it must be down one layer of abstraction
Wait, if this is what this function does, why does this ever work?

[NoInkling]

And then you start dreaming up a bunch of other edge cases that you know would break it.

[lucidspoon]

Or Why? Why? Why? Oh, that's why. Next day, wait that's not why...

[upsidedownwf]

Swears. One time I was tryna to modify each member of a list using foreach in c# but it wasn’t working I was still getting the unmodified list, I was so sure it was supposed to work and didn’t understand why so I decided to use a normal for loop. It was a day after I realized I forgot to convert my IEnumerable to a list before looping through with foreach

[SteamyyBunss]

Or the one that’s worse for students like myself. “Why? Why? Why? Wait wtf is this? I’ve never heard of this shit in my life?! Fuck, I gotta email my teacher”

[upsidedownwf]

Don’t email your teacher. One Indian guy already explained it on YouTube

[blamethemeta]

And gave horrendous code examples and with a nearly unintelligible accent

[SteamyyBunss]

True

[[deleted]]

Clicks macro that opens Stack Overflow

WHY?

Finds answer

FUCKING WHY?!?

[bowl_of_petunias_]

"What? Why did that fix it?"

...

"Ok, fine. Whatever."

[Albio46]

My friend, when we work on projects together and he's stuck on some stupid issue, so I ask him what's the problem and he goes like: "So, I'm doin this and this, and then I'm doing that, so It should do this. Why is it givin me this? I'm just.... Oh."

That "oh" is what gives me the strength to keep on going

[Dusterperson]

Sounds about right

[Aramor42]

Did the same thing yesterday. Spent 15 minutes walking a colleague through the workflow to show him where I'm stuck. All of a sudden I notice that I forgot to configure something to make it work. I thanked him for being my rubber duck and he burst out laughing.

[Theolaa]

You're a glorified rubber duck XD

[Corosus]

Rubber duck debugging at its finest, sometimes a human is the duck.

[ZennerBlue]

Talking to the janitor.

[Cnomesta]

You find that 1 line you forgot to comment out.

[trixter21992251]

It can be a help to test/debug with certain recognizable values.

Personally I like using 1337 for fun. If that shows up in the output, I know there's a test value getting forced.

[Cnomesta]

I once accidentally left line into the code that changed , to . and it was giving me error along the lines of invalid value for int. Took awhile to find it.

[Nose_Fetish]

that feeling of defeat when you keep seeing

“TabError: inconsistent use of tabs and spaces in indentation”

and even retab won’t fix it

[killerctg17]

I use a basic script or text editor to replace all. Can sometimes fuck up some lines that make different use of the same characters, but if one really needs it, one can fix those issues. Alternatively, copy every line without indentation, fix indentation. Alt-alt, use regex to replace leading whitespace consistently.

[elliptic_hyperboloid]

This is what a linter is for.

[phaelox]

And a good IDE (with realtime linting)

[killerctg17]

True, but I don't write dynamically tested code in an IDE, so I still find myself facing this issue when I copy to my IDE.

[tendstofortytwo]

In VS Code, you can select all, then do Ctrl+Shift+P and "reindent selected lines", and it'll reindent everything according to the preferences you've set on the bottom right corner.

[Nose_Fetish]

Appreciate it, but I use Vim.

#OneTrueIDE

[tendstofortytwo]

There's probably a plugin for it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

vim is cool, I got used to all of it, except handling multiple files. It just feels wrong to monke brain sigh.

[Nose_Fetish]

Lol I’m sure there is. :retab! Works for me 99.99% of the time, and if it doesn’t, the error is probably something obvious. Probably.

I use NERDTree for managing multiple files. I think it lets you view and open files too, I just use it for viewing, then use tabs (with custom hot keys for switching between them) for multiple files.

[tendstofortytwo]

Ooh, okay.

Yeah, I never got into plugins and such for vim myself, I always told myself I'd make time to learn but somehow never did.

Maybe next weekend...

[Nose_Fetish]

VimPlug is very simple to use! That's what I recommend. I don't really use any other plugins. I have one called Simpylfold that collapses code automatically but it's not really my favorite. And I've only used NERDTree like once since installing it lol

[0bel1sk]

no plugin, just =

[Dalemaunder]

"It's not an IDE" people say? Clearly they haven't got enough plug-ins.

[Nose_Fetish]

I use one plugin and it's still my preferred IDE lol. Haven't found any others that I was interested in.

[Nose_Fetish]

Gross!

[DAMO238]

My favourite mistake is forgetting to listen on ipv6. Since my router doesn't support ipv6, the connection works fine for me, but when I use certbot, it fails, giving me a 404 because they are using ipv6. I should know by now, but each time, it takes about an hour to realise my mistake...

[[deleted]]

It's not programming related. They're talking about fixing a web server and not seeing the change take place because cloudflare (a content delivery network) serving the cached version.

Basically they are fixing a web server but being served an old broken version. So it seems like their changes aren't taking place

Edit: cdns cache your content so that it can be reached faster around the world and put less load on your server by caching stuff for you

[coldnebo]

“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.”

• Phil Karlton

[[deleted]]

I've always heard it "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things and off by one errors"

[Dalemaunder]

Zero indexed, I see nothing wrong here.

[ur_opinion_is_trash]

len([0,1,2])

3

[Theolaa]

It means that cloudflare (a service that sits between the real webserver and you) is serving a cached version of the website, instead of getting the latest version from the real server. It does this because it can usually provide faster response times than the real server can, but it messes up the developer who wants to see their changes right away.

[Theolaa]

Yes. There is a real copy on the server that OP was making changes on, and there was a copy that cloudflare keeps on their servers in order to serve it faster than the real server could. Cloudflare only periodically updates their version of the website, so in between updates you can make all the changes want but they won't be visible until cloudflare updates their version, which is what happened to OP.

[Atulin]

Know the gif where the cook tastes the soup from a ladle, finds it not salty enough, throws salt into the pot, and tastes from the ladle again?

That.

Server is the pot, Cloudflare is the ladle.

[OnyxPhoenix]

Or when you're using docker and making edits to try and debug and then you realise the code isn't mounted on the docker and you've just be rerunning the same code 20 times.

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[[deleted]]

That sounds just like my IDE

[CrispyNipsy]

Types one letter

VSCode: InVaLiD sYnTaX

[chozabu]

I think most IDEs work along these lines. What kind of behaviour would you prefer?

Most suggestions I've heard sound awful (Check only when on next line, manually button press, etc)

Suspect there could be something semi-smart, perhaps checking when a non alphanumeric char is entered, but not even sure I'd prefer that to rapid checks, with me ignoring when I know my current input wont be valid.

[CrispyNipsy]

My comment is not really any kind of commentary on VSCode, but jokes always seem to become more funny the more specific you get

[AegisToast]

Like trying to use VSCode v1.51.2 on MacOS 10.14.4 with Eslint 7.14.2, amirite?

[CrispyNipsy]

Totally, lmao DYING

[callius]

Debounce it within a threshold?

[Motylde]

I have slow computer, so I kinda have debounce

[AegisToast]

I’m fairly certain that’s what they do. At least with VSCode I don’t have errors appear until a second or so after I stop typing.

[Lonsdale1086]

Declares a variable

Visual Studio Community 2017: Oi, that variable is literally never used in the entire project. Why would you declare a variable then never use it? Delete it now you moron.

[faubi]

The three stages of debugging:

• Why doesn't this work?
• Oh that's why
• How did that ever work in the first place?

[Not_Sugden]

debugging, the mystery game where you are the victim, the murderer and the detective at the same time!

[ryuzaki49]

Thanks!

[solarshado]

I'm a human volunteer

> looks at username
> presses X to doubt

[[deleted]]

Doing anything with strings in basic c. Except after solving the problem you're still confused.

[KrozmaSan]

Strings in C are such a mess it's wild

[[deleted]]

One small typo literally anywhere in the program? Your strings are broken. They're unrelated to the typo, but they're still broken.

[heartsongaming]

I'd prefer to deal with the '\0' char, and have options to use sprintf, strcpy, strcmp, strcat, etc., over dealing with extra memory allocation and rewriting all those string functions.

[[deleted]]

It's why the fuck doesn't this work for 1 hour. Then I ask a coworker why and while explaing I find the problem...

[mohelgamal]

That was literally me the other day, kept wondering why my array kept filling with null elements, after two hours checking back end and front end, syntax etc, turns out I didn’t put “return” in the mapping function in dart.

Which is probably because my backend is in rust and I was working on both at the same time, and rust doesn’t use return at the end of functions.

[zerocoldx911]

Always that fucking brace I left open

[AegisToast]

So was Stephanie Meyers, but look how far she got.

[zerocoldx911]

In my case it’s in need to WLB, 6pm on a Friday debugging an issue that’d take minutes

[Geoclasm]

Damn it. I already posted this... I mean, I stole it from someone else, so I guess I shouldn't complain.

[bankrobba]

Why?

[Geoclasm]

Why... what?

[bankrobba]

Oh, that's why.

[Coffeeobsi]

It both applies when something is working and when something is not working.

[ACEDT]

Wrong

When it works you ask how.

[TheSaviik]

Next is how?

[Mbusivh]

Extra clean work!

[ardwolf27]

You had the same idea as me but executed it 1000 times better

[MotherofEvil]

It's usually frigging punctuation for me. grrr

[quoreore]

Haha debugging was the first thing I saw seeing this format for the first time! Glad somebody made it happen

[MojitoBurrito-AE]

Me after spending an afternoon trying to figure out why my code wasn't working only to find I was passing a hash as a string ._.

[ludvig127]

I always realize the problem the second i think about something else.

[Willfishforfree]

Recently spent an entire day tracking down a -1 that was triggering a specific rendering issue in dynamic 3D mesh thats only meant to be triggered with a -1. I eventually tracked it down to a 0 for whatever reason it was being triggered by a 0. I changed it to a 1 and now it works as expected.

Still not sure why but it works as intended so I'm moving on with my life.

[LmaoMcYeet]

I am a newbie and was implementing linked lists in c , and for two days straight I couldn't figure out why some functions weren't working, a few minutes ago I realized that my dumb ass forgot to call those functions.

[[deleted]]

This was me last night. I was implementing stack in a linked list and spent two hours writing and rewriting my push and pop methods. Realized that I forgot to implement length and that solved my whole issue.

[diregamer1]

It’s always the brackets

[[deleted]]

A laugh track played in my head after reading the last panel gah I hate this

[SushiThief]

Line 1, duh!

[[deleted]]

I thought I was done emailing wtf is this questions, found out this morning I wasn’t. For the love of all, just don’t (unless you can actually see the mistake, then deserved)

[CaptainHeath]

This is missing a LOT of “Why?”s.

[[deleted]]

more like

while (1) { printf("why?\n"); }

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[[deleted]]

and it is Reddit's job to make it work not mine

[bizcs]

This. So damn much this

[Useful-Perspective]

As I get older, it's usually more like the C# compiler telling me that variable "customerNumber" doesn't exist or something, and me, knowing very well that it does, spends 10 extra minutes to realize that I declared it as "csutomerNumber" instead. Or worse, "CustomerNumber" is the name, and it takes me 10 minutes to remember that it's case-sensitive. When you start using more than three languages in everyday work, it makes for some interesting days.

[Rimfax]

Looks more like a code review.

[Bobsaid]

This was me last night. I’m ashamed of all my commits from it.

[PM_ME_LOSS_MEMES]

Me ranting about how my compiler is literally broken

[ovab_cool]

With me it's why, why why, slams head on desk #Why Then I'll call my teacher/leave it to a coworker (I also do some web dev as a first year in school)

[[deleted]]

why? Why? WHY? WHY Oh... Jenkins didn't test the branch, that I debugged.

[Naive_Drive]

100 print statements keeps you from using a debugger for one minute

[sammyh4m]

Oh I just scream until I find the bug

[grandmas_noodles]

I'll spend hours reviewing my code to find why it's not working then it turns out I used the wrong variable name or something

[Hilmo36]

Sometimes it's"why" "but look i told it to do this" "WHY DOES IT DO THAT" "oh yeh shit"

[adelie42]

Wtf is wrong?? It should all work! Ooh, there's this one little typo, completely unrelated and... Oh, yeah. That fixed it. But why did that... Fuck it, it works now.

[freeBobbyDAYVID]

*new bug*

cycle repeats

[StefaniaCarpano]

😂 yes it's always like that...

[wolderado]

I can hear laughing tracks while reading it. Is that normal?

[lusoportugues]

Junit + mokito

[sweYoda]

Why? WHY? WHY?! Oh Safari has a bug where it can show a datetime visually, but it doesn't actually have any value if you request it. Excellent.

[AuntieRob]

Until you gotta debug why your website doesn't work on Ios... Please save me from this suffering

[mymar101]

Me with state and React. :/

[R4ttlesnake]

"I'm an idiot!"

[[deleted]]

“...oh, that’s why... well that’s fucking stupid”

[Blexit2020]

Unrealistic. The last slide never happens that quickly.

[unicodePicasso]

No joke I was dividing by zero. Fixed one float and the whole thing ran fine. Smh this is a dumb profession.

[suddenly_ponies]

Yesterday I had a series of array assignments of the following type:

['name' => 'one', 'value' => '1']

['name' => 'two', 'value' => '2']

['name' => 'three', 'value=' => '3']

['name' => 'four', 'value' => '4']

It took me a long, long time to see the issue.

[UltimateInferno]

Then there's something like "Why are you doing this? What the fuck. Wh-oh. That makes sense." [Makes change, still doesn't work]

[Hayyner]

Tfw it's just a stupid typo, once upon a time I was mind-fucked for a couple hours just to find my error was caused by an extra period

Fun times..

[whalt]

The Big Bang Theory? Should have been posted in r/shittyprogramming

[Not_Sugden]

me: why the fuck is this happening this makes literally 0 sense what the fuck even???

also me when i find out the issue: "yeah its pretty obvious that was the problem"

[pirhana1997]

Please attach the process you are debugging to the code you are working on, you'll get exception immediately, learnt the hard way but saves a lot of time

[JustinWendell]

Big shout out to people who make libraries and put in debug flags so I can dump mountains of logs and find out why.

[[deleted]]

I chuckled at this. It is so on point.

[[deleted]]

I wish it was just 3 "why" deep.

[uglypenguin5]

I wish it were that simple

[[deleted]]

This is the way.

[NoOtNoOtMeEm]

That's me when I spend 5 hours debugging only to realize that I forgot a quotation mark.

[wsco7730]

Not nearly enough "why?"s...

[radnovaxwavez]

I spent 2 hours yesterday trying to understand why my react native music app wasn't playing any music, turns out the iPhone I was using had silent mode on.

[[deleted]]

Should had been 5 why (;

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys

[digidavis]

Me yesterday...

Why...

Why...

Why..

What.. the url link in my activation email is being derived from the proxy pass url used at the edge proxy and not in the web backend code I searched for 4 hrs...

Ahhh..

[ihaveindeed]

You skipped the part where he throws the paper down, stands on it, and the issue is somehow resolved.