The sweet bug-fix relief

I think in many ways the relief you feel when you manage to fix a hard-to-find bug can be compared to the feeling of intense pain going away – like painkillers when you have a terrible toothache.

I have been working on locating and fixing a bug in our crawlers at Integrasco, on and off, for the last couple of weeks. It has been a terrible stress factor and each day spent tracking data through the pipeline and debugging the code to pieces has yielded nothing. The error never occur in development, only in production – and at what seems to be a completely random pattern. All of you who know a bit of programming probably feel a cold breeze down their back right now – it’s a horrible situation to be in.

Luckily, this issue was not so severe that it has been stopping crucial parts of our system, but it had to be fixed. Today I finally discovered the source of the problem and I don’t think I have felt so good and relieved for a very long time. It was like I had been walking around with this toothache, crawling through the hot, burning Sahara desert, and finally reached a kind native with painkillers in his pocket – I guess you can only understand if you’re a developer

It’s been a few weeks since I have been really excited about going to work the next morning, but now I am really looking forward to getting in to work tomorrow and finally crush this bug with my Great Bat of Bug Crushing!

Had to share this, ’cause right now I feel great (might have something to do with the three beers I have just consumed too, actually…)!