←back to thread

303 points FigurativeVoid | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.408s | source
Show context
CleverLikeAnOx ◴[] No.41841884[source]
An old timer I worked with during my first internship called these kinds of issues "the law of coincidental failures" and I took it to heart.

I try a lot of obvious things when debugging to ascertain the truth. Like, does undoing my entire change fix the bug?

replies(3): >>41842049 #>>41845072 #>>41849661 #
1. EasyMark ◴[] No.41849661[source]
When something absolutely doesn’t make sense to me I often go back to a point in time and do a checkout of when I was 100% sure “it worked” and if it doesn’t then I assume something external changed, hardware, backend service, the earth’s wobble. If it does work then I will bisect the timeline until I Iocate it. This works for me 99% of the time on tough bugs that just defy any logic. It’s kind of known quantity as opposed to going through endless logs, blames, file diffs, etc. I know in some cases it isn’t really possible but in code that you can have a fairly quick turn around on build/install/test, it works really well.