ngl my programming career helped me stay grounded in reality. Every impossible issue turned out to always have a cause, a reason to be there. Could have taken weeks to track down the issue, but there was always a cause.
But still… every 3 or so years… something actually impossible pops-up. Impossible to fix, impossible to reproduce, and suddenly gone from existence, as if it was never there.
Well at least some of the Jenga towers have redundant Jenga tower replicas, and that Jenga tower over there has a bunch of other Jenga towers ready to be propped up by a PAASser-by given a small cold start penalty. And this one? Nobody knows how it works, but it always worked.
Yeah. First instinct in this case makes me think somebody that owns a product upstream saw a failure log and fixed the issue (I’d still want to confirm that, though)
It ran outta gas. It had a flat tire. It didn’t have enough money for cab fare. Its tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from outta town. Someone stole its car. There was an earthquake, a terrible flood, locusts!
just make sure you absolutely don’t comment or document it then commit it to git with a cryptic commit message and even more cryptic author name and then hand it off to your coworkers
Fully agree, but they’re usually kind of annoying to track regardless. On the opposite side, sometimes even getting it to trigger on purpose to be able to add a regression test can be pretty tricky, depending on the cause. Timing or time/date based stuff is a common culprit…
Don’t tell me about time and date, I am still recovering from some moron that used datetime.now() for some unit test data setup and sometimes two records (which needed to have the same time) had very slightly varying time which caused all sorts of intermittent test failures that were very tricky to nail down. Database triggers were failing causing failures in all sorts of tests in a random fashion
likely won’t help you actually fix the issue because miraculously you didn’t log the three variables you actually need but it’ll make you feel better in the meantime
fails when deployed, after adding debug statements looks like in one structure there’s 2 instead of 1, and looking at the code that should be impossible. Issue happens every single time.
the same exact unmodified container when downloaded and run locally works correctly every time.
A lot of people think I’m joking when I say I’m a good at what I do because I’m a witch doctor with computers. Software Engineering requires experience with the occult, at a minimum.
I actually had a concept for a fantasy world, where magicians craft spells much the same way software devs do. So you make your spell and publish it to the ether, and then anyone can invoke it using the magic word (package name), assuming the have the right dependencies available (eye of newt or whatever). But spells might have bugs. So if you used eye of red newt while the spell smith built it with the expectation you had eye of blue newt you might get unintended consequences
i mean it’s pretty common for runes to just be conceptual programming languages and if you do something wrong then instead of having a lighter you get a bomb
The demons are attracted to doorways, passages between spaces, worlds, and realms. And printers are the ultimate doorway: a portal through which ideas and concepts can leave the software realm and enter the physical
I had a bug in unity once where my project just stopped working. I hadn’t changed anything, but I could no longer compile it or run the game in editor. I looked up the issue and apparently unity has/had a long-standing bug where the engine would rarely just quit being able to compile your scripts. The only solution was to make a new project and reimport all your assets, scripts, scenes, etc. Dunno if they ever figured out what was causing it or if it just kinda resolved itself and stopped showing up at some point. I don’t really use unity much anymore.
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ngl my programming career helped me stay grounded in reality. Every impossible issue turned out to always have a cause, a reason to be there. Could have taken weeks to track down the issue, but there was always a cause.
But still… every 3 or so years… something actually impossible pops-up. Impossible to fix, impossible to reproduce, and suddenly gone from existence, as if it was never there.
Given how software is a giant Jenga tower made of smaller Jenga towers it’s amazing any of it works at all
Relavent article: How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code
Well at least some of the Jenga towers have redundant Jenga tower replicas, and that Jenga tower over there has a bunch of other Jenga towers ready to be propped up by a PAASser-by given a small cold start penalty. And this one? Nobody knows how it works, but it always worked.
Right? … Right?
Yeah. First instinct in this case makes me think somebody that owns a product upstream saw a failure log and fixed the issue (I’d still want to confirm that, though)
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Cosmic radiation! Bit flips! Quantum tunneling! Who TF knows…
It ran outta gas. It had a flat tire. It didn’t have enough money for cab fare. Its tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from outta town. Someone stole its car. There was an earthquake, a terrible flood, locusts!
If only consumer hardware had ECC memory
lucky, you have code gnomes. leave out an offering of mountain dew and pizza rolls to appease the spirits.
Code works
Ctrl+a, ctrl+x, ctrl+v
Code doest work
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just make sure you absolutely don’t comment or document it then commit it to git with a cryptic commit message and even more cryptic author name and then hand it off to your coworkers
AAA why do people do that, like wtf you spent so much time fixing this, ATLEAST MAKE IT CLEAR WHAT YOU DID
searching google and finding a ten year old stackoverflow post with your exact problem but the answer is just “nevermind i figured it out”
Hahahaha
Rule 9 from Agans’s Debugging: If you didn’t fix it, it ain’t fixed
Intermittent problems are the worst…
The problem is, how do you fix it if you can’t make it break?
The worst thing is when somebody comes to you saying “yeah, I had this problem yesterday, but it’s working now”.
You should have a unit test you can run until failure
Fully agree, but they’re usually kind of annoying to track regardless. On the opposite side, sometimes even getting it to trigger on purpose to be able to add a regression test can be pretty tricky, depending on the cause. Timing or time/date based stuff is a common culprit…
Don’t tell me about time and date, I am still recovering from some moron that used datetime.now() for some unit test data setup and sometimes two records (which needed to have the same time) had very slightly varying time which caused all sorts of intermittent test failures that were very tricky to nail down. Database triggers were failing causing failures in all sorts of tests in a random fashion
this is a case for excessive logging man
likely won’t help you actually fix the issue because miraculously you didn’t log the three variables you actually need but it’ll make you feel better in the meantime
and gives you some headroom in improving performance since it’s being choked by the excessive logging
Still better than my Go experience 2 years ago.
The longer I’m in IT, the more I realize that the adeptus mechanicus might be on to something with beseeching the machine spirit.
A lot of people think I’m joking when I say I’m a good at what I do because I’m a witch doctor with computers. Software Engineering requires experience with the occult, at a minimum.
I actually had a concept for a fantasy world, where magicians craft spells much the same way software devs do. So you make your spell and publish it to the ether, and then anyone can invoke it using the magic word (package name), assuming the have the right dependencies available (eye of newt or whatever). But spells might have bugs. So if you used eye of red newt while the spell smith built it with the expectation you had eye of blue newt you might get unintended consequences
i mean it’s pretty common for runes to just be conceptual programming languages and if you do something wrong then instead of having a lighter you get a bomb
“In my professional opinion, this network is haunted.”
…haunted?
(Points to various certifications) “HAUNTED.”
And for some reason printers seem to be the place where the spirits are strongest
I think you mean demons
The demons are attracted to doorways, passages between spaces, worlds, and realms. And printers are the ultimate doorway: a portal through which ideas and concepts can leave the software realm and enter the physical
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When you unwittingly leave yourself a code timebomb
Must’ve been the effective_date.
Maybe it only works on even dates, which is, you know, perfectly normal.
I had a bug in unity once where my project just stopped working. I hadn’t changed anything, but I could no longer compile it or run the game in editor. I looked up the issue and apparently unity has/had a long-standing bug where the engine would rarely just quit being able to compile your scripts. The only solution was to make a new project and reimport all your assets, scripts, scenes, etc. Dunno if they ever figured out what was causing it or if it just kinda resolved itself and stopped showing up at some point. I don’t really use unity much anymore.