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Comment by gumby

5 years ago

I love these toughies, especially the full ssh one! A true debugging wizard.

“Dumb” problems can happen to anyone too. I once walked by the desk of$well_known_open_source_developer who was struggling with a mysterious bug. He’d narrowed it down to the specific function and was groveling in the function setup code (what the compiler generates before your code is called) He asked me to take a look and within seconds I saw an uninitialized variable being read.

This is not because he was a bozo! He had decades of experience. It’s simply that sometimes we get slightly wedged and can’t see the thing that is “staring us in the face”. He was embarrassed (so not mentioning his name) but he should not have been. If anything it simply proves that it can happen to anyone.

Related to this: at one organization my debugging skills were (spoiler: undeservedly) legendary...literally word got around until some new hire asked me about it months later.

Why? I came in one morning to find some folks trying to get some new model of terminals to work with the mainframe. Back then you needed the right combo of byte length, stop bits etc. they asked me if I could fix it and I said sure. As one does I poked at the setting switches and walked off to get my coffee So I could come back and think clearly. By the time I came back all the terminals were in use so I just went on with my day.

Apparently I had randomly toggled the necessary bit. But the way the story was told: I had walked in, agreed to help, rubbed my chin then simply pushed the right button and walked off without another word. Which in some sense is true, But gave me completely undeserved credit.

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gumby

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_y4o5  5 years ago

When I was a kid (teenager) I worked at an indoords shooting range, mind you, not real guns but just BB guns. I was supervising a bunch of school kids do some practice shooting at biathlon targets (just 10m however) and one of them had an issue with the gun with the pellet getting stuck somehow. I had a look at the gun, sorted the pellet out and fired the gun off the hip and hit a bullseye without aiming. Pure luck of course but the kids were like "woaaah" and of course I never told them that it was just luck and not my mad leet shooting skills XD

no-s  5 years ago

on the subject of "dumb problems" and undeserved acclamation:

One day I walked into the break room and observed one of the dev team leaders pissing on about how the vending machine didn't have the snack he wanted. I tapped on the glass right in front of him and he was instantly chagrined at the appearance of what he was missing right in front of his face.

This happens often enough I have some stock humor saved up for the occasion. In a serious tone I told him not to fret, I had observed this was a common problem with good developers who don't take enough breaks and with a little self-examination he could overcome it. In a kidding tone, I told him he was obviously stuck in trap of working too hard to work smart. "Just check your assumptions with a Pareto graph and a lot of life's little dilemmas will fall apart into easy pieces," I sez with a chuckle.

Later on it turned out he had told his team and they had a chuckle over how I enjoyed kidding them. Then they turned to the problem at hand and my guy had an aha moment and realized one of the grounding assumptions they had since literally the beginning of the project was subtly off. The week before I had solved someone's Java boxing/unboxing problem literally by accident in a single glance at the debugging trace whilst kidding him over his attempt to cast Integer into Long (int promoted to Integer in a library call). The team added up all my bad jokes and occasional "accidental" help, and in a collective Aha decided I was some kind of software engineering guru (I'm not - just a lot of painful painful experience to make light of).

And for a few months thereafter the devs would intently ponder everything I said. That quarter I actually got devs assigned to my issues because they all clamored to rub up against my supposed enlightenment, heheh. After I realized what was going on I got my top ten addressed and then suggested they needed to apply their learning to other people's issues...before they discovered my feet of clay...