~~demons~~ ahem. data-races.
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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Trying to debug race conditions be like
Yuuup… Debugging concurrent code is a bitch.
You make a change. It doesn't fix it.
You change it back. The code now works.
The code now ~~works~~ breaks in a new way.
the real fix was the journey, the destination never mattered
xkcd 242 obviously
I feel called out. I'm not sure which way I'd go.
Get somebody else to pull it.
For science.
Me playing point and click games
The absolute worst thing that can happen is if it suddenly starts working without doing anything
Sweet, push to production.
But sometimes it works, or throws a different error ...
And a different error means progress!
you have to check if you are dealing with a bug or with a ghost
When it does a different crazy thing every time and you have no idea why, it means you're a genius and have created life.
Or you’re coding in C.
Actually tru. Damn preprocessors.
The error message goes stale when it's been sitting for a while. I need to see a fresh one.
Code doesn't work; don't know why.
Code works; don't know why.
Cargo Cult Programming is bad.
This is just how you use Visual Studio
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
When your Makefile is so fucked up that you have to run it multiple times to get everything to build and link properly.
You jest but “wait and retry” is such a powerful tool in my DevOps toolbox. First thing I tell junior engineers when they run across anything weird
Honestly, in DevOpS, when you’re running stuff in a GitHub Action/Azure DevOps Pipeline/Jenkins, yeah… sometimes a run will fail for no obvious reason.
And then work the next time (and the next 100+ times after that) when you haven’t changed a damn thing.
"Maybe if we ignore the problem, it will go away"
The first one is to warm up the engine. Like getting your car ignition to kick over in the winter
and sometimes that's exactly what's needed. Services wake up, connections get established and then when you try again things are up and it works.
sometimes it needs to warm up.. or cool down
Just making sure that the write buffer was flushed or something.
Running the code again is fast and requires no thinking. Finding the problem is slow and requires a lot of thinking.
It's worth looking under the light-post in case your keys somehow rolled there. Just not for long.
This would be more mockable if it didn't often WORK.
You know, youve gotta give your computer some warmup.
Computer needs practice to get program right.
gotta rule out cosimc rays flipping a bit or two
Not sure which is worse. When you know you changed nothing and it inexplicably starts|stops working compared to yesterday
Far worse, and this applies to more than programming. If something is broken, I want it to be consistent. Don't fix yourself, or sort of work but have a different effect. Break, and give me something to figure out, damn it.
And run it with the debugger.
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.
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