| 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. |