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Peter Tasker
Peter Tasker

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What's the dumbest bug you caused yourself

I was thinking about this recently, what's the dumbest bug you've caused yourself?

I'll go first.

More often then not my code won't work because of a rampant letter 's' somewhere in the code. 'Undefined variable s' etc.

The reason? Hitting CMD-s to save a file and letting off CMD too early...

:face-palm:

Top comments (48)

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ardennl profile image
Arden de Raaij

Editing in development environment while watching another environment for changes that never come. I'm afraid to say I've wasted way too much time wondering why nothing worked.

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hrmny profile image
Leah

Yeah happened to me a lot, or copying a file and then editing the original expecting the copy to change

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sir_wernich profile image
Wernich ️

oh man, similar thing. we have a project that loads two other projects as modules. the one module uses hardlinks so you're able to change the JS/cshtml while it's running. the other project was never set up that way (probably because it was going to be a temporary project). the projects are combined in VS with a "combined" project that has everything in one place so we don't need to run three instances of VS.

so instead of stopping, changing and rebuilding, i would just edit the js/cshtml files that were copied to the main project when everything builds, then copying the changed files back to the project's source directories...

... except when i didn't copy and thought it was safe to rebuild. lost my work so many times. facepalm

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abandonedfridge profile image
Daniel Nielson

How about freaking out over why changes aren't posting to dev only to realize you've been pushing to production... Yeah, me neither...🤫🙄

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ptasker profile image
Peter Tasker

Oh man, so much this.

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kammy_smb profile image
kammy

This has happened so many times to me it's quite embarrassing at this point

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kayis profile image
K • Edited

Classic. Wrong file/folder/server is the first I look when helping a co-worker debugging.

Next: permissions

Also: Caching

(Still happens to me all the time xD)

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ardennl profile image
Arden de Raaij

I like how many people relate. Makes me feel slightly less idiotic 😂

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gregorgonzalez profile image
Gregor Gonzalez

This is really common. Happened to me when I work on multiple projects at same time. Also when I have many copies "app" "app1" "app2" "apptest"

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sabatesduran profile image
Dídac

So many times

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andy profile image
Andy Zhao (he/him)

I dropped test coverage by over 60%, all because I left a setting that focused on running a single test and only that test.

This happened today.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

One time I was writing some code and I heard the Mac trash can sound in my headphones and it confused me for a second, but I kind of shrugged it off. A little later I went to commit some code to production and it was a tiny fix and I did git add . and made the push without thinking much. Then I went off to do some other things.

A little later I notice that A CRITICAL IMAGE IS MISSING and that's when I realized what the trash can sound was. I accidentally sent something to the trash as my computer lagged and I clicked some keys while it was frozen.

I HEARD THE TRASH CAN sound and when I put two and two together it was major face palm.

Very sloppy.

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ptasker profile image
Peter Tasker

Lol, yeah the trash can sound is never good...

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frosnerd profile image
Frank Rosner

Neither is git add . :P

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garwan50 profile image
Garwan50 • Edited

Not a big deal but i wrote
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, "Authorization : something");
instead of
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, "Authorization: something");
took me three days and stackoverflow to notice it

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falansari profile image
Ash

ouch XD

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jballanc profile image
Joshua Ballanco

The biggest face-palm bug I've faced was while working on a language runtime. I was implementing a method aliasing feature that, if working correctly, would extract a method from one object and inject it into another. I coded up a solution that should have worked, fired up a REPL, and attempted to hit the new aliased method.

I was promptly greeted by an error with the message "This method does not exist." Crud!

I went back and reviewed my implementation. I tried adjusting some things, moving allocations and dereferencing pointers slightly differently, and yet each time I got the same answer: "This method does not exist." I put in some debug logging statements, but everything looked correct. I stepped through the whole process in a debugger, and still everything looked correct.

At a loss, I randomly decided to look at the implementation of the method I was attempting to alias. Since it was a library method, and not part of the project I was working on, I had to go check out the code and dig in. Eventually, after working out all the complex inheritance and class-cluster implementation details, I found the source of the specific method I was working with. It was, in effect:

fprintf(stderr, "This method does not exist.");
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alephnaught2tog profile image
Max Cerrina • Edited

I just laughed so hard I woke the dog up.

My project for PHP this past semester was a site to track my errors with the idea that eventually you could have multiple users, share them, think of things to look for in your own code, learn, etc. I hadn't thought about the debugging issues that would arise when my code and text was full of the word "error" and oh man, the number of times I would stare at the screen because of the error message that showed up... only to realize that no, that WAS what was supposed to happen, I was TRYING to show those error messages.

Eventually I just added a temporary class to make all of those "error" messages bright green.

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klemensek profile image
klemensek

my cheapest bug in the code:
back in 2005 I needed to send email to 300 customers in two for loops..
so I sent 300 identical emails to each customer, because of index error in second for

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hewerlin profile image
Hendrik Ewerlin

I developed a company-internal social application with LDAP authentication.
I used a code snipplet.
As it turned out, any username with empty password worked just fine. The code snipplet would simply skip password check for "undefined" empty password.
:-o

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falansari profile image
Ash

I nearly made that same mistake last month x'D luckily while I was testing login, I "accidentally" left the p.w field empty when I was trying out different combos. Lo and behold I got in lol! Fixed fast.

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Erin Moore

I accidentally mis-wrote some CSS, so the animation from an svg loading element bled over to all the svg's on the page. The feature we were working on involved a rating page with a bunch of yellow stars (think amazon reviews) that now all spun around. It delighted everyone and they made me show it to the executive in charge of the whole division.😅

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David Addario

This one time, in band-camp, my login authentication banned the IP address of a user who had 3 consecutive failed login attempts. Out of nowhere, the entire e-commerce site was "down". Needless to say, It took me an entire day to figure out that one of the managers had forgotten his password and banned the outbound IP address for the entire organization. Ugh

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D. J. Pallotta

Forgot to set up a rewind for a segue and wondered why the app dutifully consumed memory no matter how many times the "back" button was tapped. That screen is gone, why are there a dozen copies in memory??!!?

After that adventure I forced myself to learn how to properly use navigation controllers.