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462 points jakevoytko | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.503s | source
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AnimalMuppet ◴[] No.43494810[source]
I've told my personal worst here a couple of times. So this time I'm going to talk about a co-worker named Ed.

On an embedded system, we had this bug that we couldn't find. It was around for a month or two. Random crashes that we couldn't reproduce, couldn't even debug. We started calling it "the phantom".

Finally Ed said, "I think the phantom showed up after we made that change to the ethernet driver." We reverted it, and the bug disappeared.

We never found the bug in the source code. But Ed debugged it using the calendar.

replies(1): >>43495201 #
1. dgfitz ◴[] No.43495201[source]
Interesting, at $dayjob we had (have?) a bug where something would fail, randomly, intermittently, maybe once every 3 months.

Pulled my hair out for a year, no progress/insights. Updated the driver for a device, haven't seen it since.

I hope the reverse-calendar debugging works for me!