Zen and the art of debugging

Day 297 / 366

Debugging code is a very bittersweet experience. It’s both the thing that I love as well as I hate about being a developer. And you have to be a developer to understand this trauma.

The tough part about debugging is that there is no set way to debug. Most of the time it is just a series of trial and error. With time you get used to seeing some bugs and you are able to debug things faster. But you can never be certain. This is why in most companies devs will never give you an estimate on how long it will take them to solve a bug. They are just being honest.

And then every now and then a bug will come which will break you. You will not be able to solve it in hours, days or even weeks. But you will still keep trying because deep inside there is an itch in you that wants to solve it. You don’t accept defeat. There have been bugs that have took me over a month to solve. And the joy I get after I finally solve them is unmatched.

I have heard devs say that they sometimes dream about bugs that they were not able to solve during the day. I have been there myself as well.

But as much as we hate debugging, I think coding would become really boring without it. I see bugs as challenges now, and very seldom do they cause me to lose my cool. And I have gotten really good at it as well, maybe just cause I have been doing this for over a decade.