How did making coffee help me find a bug in my code?

I know what you're thinking. Did that really happened? My answer is yes, it happened.

Context

It happened a couple of months after I started working in a team that developed browser extension. I got some bug to investigate related with one key feature of its extension.

When I found a code that was the potential culprit of a bug, I just set breakpoints in the browser and started trying to incrementally move through the code to examine it.

But I had no luck. I spent a big chunk of my time trying to trigger it in different ways… but still the corner case I wanted to find was hidden.

Coffee

After a couple of minutes I needed a quick break to make a cup of coffee and to think about other approaches that I could follow to find the culprit. But when I got back to my browser and IDE I spotted that the breakpoint was active! Something had triggered the correct code.

Solution

It turned out that feature I was testing, was using idle browser API. As a name says that API was allowing the user to track a device idle state. Inside a code I found an event handler responsible for doing the rest of the work. Solving a bug was super easy in the end.

That history is still funny after couple years… I still can’t believe that I solved a bug by preparing a coffee :)