Rule 9 from Agans's Debugging: If you didn't fix it, it ain't fixed

Intermittent problems are the worst...

ngl my programming career helped me stay grounded in reality. Every impossible issue turned out to always have a cause, a reason to be there. Could have taken weeks to track down the issue, but there was always a cause.

But still.. every 3 or so years.. something actually impossible pops-up. Impossible to fix, impossible to reproduce, and suddenly gone from existence, as if it was never there.

The longer I’m in IT, the more I realize that the adeptus mechanicus might be on to something with beseeching the machine spirit.

The other day I launched an old game and got met with an error, something about directX9 and missing a redistributable file or something. Decided not to fuck with it.

Yesterday I launched it again to take a closer look at the error message to see if I could fix it. No error message, game booted without issues.

My confusion.

if (new Date().getDay() % 2) {
    runCode();
}

I have this issue once in a while with PowerShell.

The environment gets f'up as you develop. You get strange shit happening or it blows up.

Restart PowerShell or reboot and it's all good

lucky, you have code gnomes. leave out an offering of mountain dew and pizza rolls to appease the spirits.

Still better than my Go experience 2 years ago.

• fails when deployed, after adding debug statements looks like in one structure there's 2 instead of 1, and looking at the code that should be impossible. Issue happens every single time.
• the same exact unmodified container when downloaded and run locally works correctly every time.

Build caches are a bitch.

I had that happen with embedded programming when you forget to flush the eeprom after changing your saved values.

Cosmic radiation could always wreak havock by simply switching a 0 to a 1. It appears The Universe is Hostile to Computers.

Maybe it only works on even dates, which is, you know, perfectly normal.

In university, we had to complete weekly tasks. A few times, the validation script provided by my professor returned an error, meaning that my solution had a mistake. When I tried rerunning the script the following day, my answer was accepted. At the end of the last lecture, my professor came to me and told me that I was usually the first one to hand in a solution and that he sometimes used my answers to validate his results.

I've recently had the opposite: code worked then the next day without anything changing it didn't.

Turned out the J-Link programmer always needs the license check to work, but that expires every day at midnight. It only prompts again if you choose the app and restart it. So I couldn't get my debugger to work and spent hours trying to figure it out until I did the best thing. I turned it off and on again.

So... Network issue. I'm not falling for those ever again.

I had a bug in unity once where my project just stopped working. I hadn't changed anything, but I could no longer compile it or run the game in editor. I looked up the issue and apparently unity has/had a long-standing bug where the engine would rarely just quit being able to compile your scripts. The only solution was to make a new project and reimport all your assets, scripts, scenes, etc. Dunno if they ever figured out what was causing it or if it just kinda resolved itself and stopped showing up at some point. I don't really use unity much anymore.

just make sure you absolutely don't comment or document it then commit it to git with a cryptic commit message and even more cryptic author name and then hand it off to your coworkers

Code works

Ctrl+a, ctrl+x, ctrl+v

Code doest work

As a full stack cloud dev usually for me it ends up being some lag between when Azure claims a thing was updated and when it actually was.

(shout out to azure B2C custom policies for taking like 10 minutes to actually reflect changes despite giving me a lil green checkmark)

Reminds me of the time I couldn't get my code to compile due to invisible unicode characters in the code I copy-pasted from the web.

Did you include an odd day of the month exception?

It do be like that sometimes... haha

Setting up a stack of mongo db and unifi network application in docker compose
Doesnt work

Takes stack down, turns a setting off and on, starts the compose
Suddenly starts working

._.

Must've been the effective_date.