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War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged

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462 points jakevoytko | 3 comments | 24 Mar 25 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.243s | source
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jonnycoder ◴[27 Mar 25 04:02 UTC] No.43490289[source]▶
I’m not even close to being on par with other faang engineers but this is far from being a very difficult bug in my experience. The hardest bugs are the ones where the repro takes days to repro. But nonetheless the op’s tenacity is all that matters and I would trust them to solve any of the hard problems Ive faced in the past.
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1. jakevoytko ◴[27 Mar 25 04:15 UTC] No.43490353[source]▶
Hi, author here! At my job before Google I had to debug these kinds of bugs for our mobile robotics / computer vision stack, but I found them fun so they didn't feel "hard" per se. The most time-consuming one took a month on basically a camera-mounted computer vision system, where after an hour of use the system would start stuttering unusably. But the journey took us through heat throttling on 2009-era gaming laptops, esoteric windows APIs, hardware design, and ultimately distributed queuing. But fixing it was a blast! I learned a ton. I hated that project but fixing that bug was the highlight of it.
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2. Scramblejams ◴[27 Mar 25 15:01 UTC] No.43494381[source]▶
I’d read that blog post!
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3. jakevoytko ◴[27 Mar 25 17:12 UTC] No.43495675[source]▶
Thanks for the suggestion, I may do that next month if I can remember enough of the details!