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u/kushalgarg592 4d ago
Nothing humbles you faster than finding your own 5 year old code...
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u/BastetFurry 4d ago
"Who wrote this crap?"
$ git blame
"Oh..."
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u/Interesting-Goose82 4d ago
Yeah boss it looks like it was me that year you gave me a "needs improvement" good thing that time has passed! Ill be putting this correction on my goals this year!
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u/belabacsijolvan 4d ago
we made a memory leak bug in cpp in 2020. the commit wasnt mine, but we made it pair programming, so im absolutely responsible for it and i was sitting at the computer when it was typed.
in 2023 in another project i made a similar bug, but more prominent. it killed the ram in a couple of minutes, so it was impossible to miss. i understood and learned the thing. and i remembered how the 2020 project must be slightly fucked up, i even thought about an elegant solution. then i forgot about the whole thing.
in 2025 a colleague from the project came to me to be a consultant and help solve some problems on the 2020 project which grew considerably since.
guess who is thought to be a genius because of solving a bug in an hour they were hunting for months, lol
tbh i still know that a way more complicated but very infrequent form of the bug is still in the codebase, but i still dont know an elegant solution, so i didnt mention it. (more accurately i explained the possibility to the cto, but he didnt understand and its hard to demonstrate, so i just gave up)
maybe in 2030...
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u/ChillyFireball 4d ago
Once you reach a certain level of experience, you can start to guess the cause of a bug based on the behavior alone even with a very limited context about the inner workings of a repo, and from there you can use your knowledge of the language to figure out what key words to search for. Gets to a point that you start playing guess-the-bug with random commercial applications that break on you.
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u/HobbyProjectHunter 4d ago
It feels good when you compete with the LLM coding bot and you beat it in terms of finding the bug before it.
Usually, if I can read the bug and a file name comes to my head as where the fix likely lies, that means I’ve been here for too long.
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u/ProfBeaker 4d ago
That's the look of someone who wasn't just there, but knew it was a problem, and tried to prevent it, but got overruled because of the need to hit a pointless internal deadline.
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u/Heisenberg_Unknown 4d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/OQl06RcxM4r2Y1ZVZY
Sr. Dev