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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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Have you ever felt completely helpless when facing down a coding problem?

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Julia Flash • Edited

Yes. Was making nlp pipeline and was working with spaCy right when it came out. Stackoverflow didnt have anything on what I was facing, nobody answered my question I asked. I looked at some of their Github issues and was lost. Everyone said it was over their head when I asked for help from others. It totally wasn't over their heads but think it looked scary or something. I ended up going back to NLTK bc of time crunch on project and took a class for learning spacy more. Class I took was too basic. :-/ But -! Got the project done!

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Jeremy Stover

Yup. I have a few stories of trying to get password saving to work on all browsers, or trying to find memory leaks in react ssr apps, but it's more often that I feel helpless cause my motivation to code fails. Finding the will to work on something I don't find interesting has been the biggest boon on my career, and it still makes me feel helpless daily. :Shrug:

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Dave Jacoby

There was the time I spent a week trying to get going with an R project and failing because the documentation lied about how to open a data set and I thought I just couldn't copy/paste right...

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John Paul Ada

Yep. Mostly during Google Code Jams LOL

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Praveen Bisht

Yes, firebase with express has been causing an issue that shouldn't be there because that's literally the first that I added that should've eliminated that error and what's worst is all the tutorials have outdated code even the ones posted few months ago. Firebase docs is so huge since it has support for multiple languages and stack overflow solutions for the error are for front end only. it's frustrating but I'll try to figure it out with fresh mind later.

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Riccardo Bernardini

no. At most lazy and tired

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Vikas Raj

Yeah, I felt completely helpless when I was first started to wrap my head around AWS.

That time was a nightmare.

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Scott Simontis

At 21 years old, I was allowed to design a digital billboard system. We had identified a vendor who would provide the sign modules, but I was responsible for the design of all control and scheduling software and procuring any additional hardware we needed. It was the coolest thing I have ever worked on.

The day before we're supposed to ship the first batch of signs, I can't get the display driver to work. It was looking like I was going to have to rewrite my code from start and dig into some Win32 nightmare methods to copy video memory. We can't really delay; we have a freight company scheduled to come by at noon and they are expecting six signs on the manifest. Failure was not an option!

I knew I had worked with one of the libraries that played a major part in the vendor's display system before and had a feeling it was missing options. Sure enough, I found some configuration info in a random blog post, and when I copied it over to the sign's controller, everything started working!

I had spent my 21st birthday up til 4AM getting these signs to work, and the glow of the room when the first ads started rolling across seemed so vibrant between the sleep dep/ecstasy of success/recognition I can go sleep now. Looking back, there's no way I would have rather spent my 21st birthday.

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Daragh Byrne

Quite often. But I've built up quite a catalogue of evidence to say I'll eventually crack the problem, or be able to explain it in such a way that a workaround becomes feasible.

Usually by stepping away from the keyboard, taking a break and inviting someone else's perspective.

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Mohammed Samgan Khan

it was in my initial days. I was working on the backend of an exam portal and the client wanted to add mathematical expression in the question. I was using Ckeditor. it took me a good amount of time to figure that out.

quite an exp. that was.

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Ben Halpern

I recall being really frustrated by an undocumented iOS Safari bug in the past. Seems like Apple's internal bug trackers and forum posts on these subjects tend not to bubble up to search engines very cleanly in my experience.

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Forrest Akin

I can handle coding problems; it's the deep-rooted organizational/procedural issues that make me feel helpless. Any problems I've faced in code can usually be traced to how the organization operates.

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Martín Emanuel

Well, a few days ago I was asked to solve the "Minimum Transaction Problem" in a test. Things didn't go well like... at all.

I was absolutely lost. I have some knowledge in algorithms, data structures and graph theory, but I never had to solve something like that. Of course, I didn't pass the test.

For me the biggest problem was the lack of time to think. I had like 2 to 3 hs to solve something that I've never faced before and I had to rush a solution. It was a total failure.

I think that when we're facing a problem and we're hopeless the best thing to do is to take a break, like a real brake, and do something else. Take a walk, play some games, watch a movie. Come back a few hours later - or just take the day off - and then face the problem starting from scratch with a new mindset.

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Daniel Schulz

When I'm in a work environment, I always try to relax and build my stuff as good as I can. If I can't do something, because I lack either skill or time, I talk to the manager and try to find a solution. I take a pretty hard stance against working overtime or an unhealthy environment, so I rarely get into those situations.
At pet projects it's even more relaxed because I can take my time to learn everything to complete it.
However, when I get stuck doing a coding test in a job interview, I really do feel helpless, because there's a time limit and there are no colleages to turn to for help.

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Jaimie Carter

Every day. Haha