Ah, come on this is valid investigation.
If you get the same error every time, you know you can find it and debug it, somewhat with ease.
If you don’t, you might have a thornier issue at hand.
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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I hate how stupid and obvious this is, but we all do it at least once if the compile is short. But with a 20 min compile, I am investigating.
You make a change. It doesn't fix it.
You change it back. The code now works.
the real fix was the journey, the destination never mattered
The code now ~~works~~ breaks in a new way.
Trying to debug race conditions be like
Yuuup… Debugging concurrent code is a bitch.
The absolute worst thing that can happen is if it suddenly starts working without doing anything
Sweet, push to production.
I started coding professionally using Visual Basic (3!). Everybody made fun of VB's On Error Resume Next "solution" to error handling, which basically said if something goes wrong just move on to the next line of code. But apparently nobody knew about On Error Resume, which basically said if something goes wrong just execute the offending line again. This would of course manifest itself as a locked app and usually a rapidly-expanding memory footprint until the computer crashed. Basically the automated version of this meme.
BTW just to defend VB a little bit, you didn't actually have to use On Error Resume Next, you could do On Error Goto errorHandler and then put the errorHandler label at the bottom of your routine (after an Exit Sub) and do actual structured error handling. Not that anybody in the VB world ever actually did this.
The error message goes stale when it's been sitting for a while. I need to see a fresh one.
sometimes you don't compile it enthusiastically enough
Just making sure that the write buffer was flushed or something.
sometimes it needs to warm up.. or cool down
When your Makefile is so fucked up that you have to run it multiple times to get everything to build and link properly.
does it count if i run it again, but with a debugger attached?
This genuinely happens regularly in our testing environment 🥲
Because you're Good developer
~~demons~~ ahem. data-races.
This is just how you use Visual Studio
Or the code you are working on is calling a system that is currently unreliable which you cannot be responsible for.
Fuck test automation, it's a fucking trap get out of it as soon as you can
Fuck test automation, it’s a fucking trap get out of it as soon as you can
lol.
Meanwhile, the org I work at has no test automation, so things that should be trivial require hours of tedious, error-prone, manual testing. Also they break stuff and don't find out until after it's merged.
This post has appeared in multiple places. It's useful , but it ruins the development career potential of people that stick with it, because any subsequent job application just sees "TESTER" and not "DEVELOPER" and bars you from changing specialization.
I've known several people who moved from QA and testing to developer roles, but usually as an internal transfer.
Most recruiters and management don't know shit about fuck when it comes to technical details, so it's not surprising a lot of them think "Oh the guy who knows how software works and how to handle edge cases? No, we don't want him"
moved from QA and testing to developer roles, but usually as an internal transfer.
yeah. My current company botched mine.
xkcd 242 obviously
Me playing point and click games
You know what this is based AF because if you don’t do it a second time how would you know if it wasn’t a weird edge case or a race condition or maybe you just didn’t internalize the cause and effect because you weren’t looking for it until a bug appeared
I feel called out. I'm not sure which way I'd go.
But sometimes it works, or throws a different error ...
Actually tru. Damn preprocessors.
you have to check if you are dealing with a bug or with a ghost
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The usual for me is that I flip back over to my editor and hit ctrl+save, cause heaven forbid I ever remember to do that before running.
I have no regrets from setting my editor to save-on-blur
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