DEV Community

Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

Posted on

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

Tell the story

Latest comments (29)

Collapse
 
juliathepm profile image
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!

Collapse
 
kadajett profile image
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:

Collapse
 
jacoby profile image
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...

Collapse
 
johnpaulada profile image
John Paul Ada

Yep. Mostly during Google Code Jams LOL

Collapse
 
prvnbist profile image
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that's literally the first that I added that should've eliminated that error and what's worst is all the tutorials have outdated code even the ones posted few months ago.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.

Collapse
 
pinotattari profile image
Riccardo Bernardini

no. At most lazy and tired

Collapse
 
numtostr profile image
Vikas Raj

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

That time was a nightmare.

Collapse
 
ssimontis profile image
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.

Collapse
 
codingmindfully profile image
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.

Collapse
 
msamgan profile image
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.