Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Bug Hunting

The three stages of bug hunt­ing (via ~stevenf)

1. It can nev­er happen!
2. Strange, it happens…
3. How can it even have worked before?

more eas­i­ly under­stood as: denial, accep­tance, and amazement.

Many bugs I’ve encoun­tered and fixed in my young Com­put­er Sci­ence days went through these steps. While denial is use­ful for ego infla­tiong, I quick­ly grew past it, because I real­ized it did­n’t con­tribute any­thing to a final solu­tion: it only delayed inevitable accep­tance. It’s quite hard to deny the exis­tence of a bug when the pro­gram crash­es or when a tree tra­ver­sal returns incor­rect values.