[asauce]

Around 10 years ago, my friend and I were working on an assignment for our intro to programming course. The assignment involved controlling an LCD screen with an Mega 2560 board.

Finally, after many failed attempts and a few too many coffees we managed to complete the assignment. I left a comment in the code “// We did it!!!!”, and we called it a night.

The next day we tried to demo to our TA and suddenly our code wouldn’t upload. Tried multiple PCs, multiple arduino’s, and had multiple TAs look into our code. No idea.

Finally one brilliant TA heard our story and deleted the comment I left. Suddenly the upload worked! Turns out anytime the bootloader saw “!!!” anywhere in the code it would drop into debugging mode and cause the upload to fail. Even if it was in a comment! That bug gave me major trust issues working with that 2560 that semester haha