ngl my programming career helped me stay grounded in reality. Every impossible issue turned out to always have a cause, a reason to be there. Could have taken weeks to track down the issue, but there was always a cause.
But still… every 3 or so years… something actually impossible pops-up. Impossible to fix, impossible to reproduce, and suddenly gone from existence, as if it was never there.
Cosmic radiation! Bit flips! Quantum tunneling! Who TF knows…
Given how software is a giant Jenga tower made of smaller Jenga towers it’s amazing any of it works at all
Rule 9 from Agans’s Debugging: If you didn’t fix it, it ain’t fixed
Intermittent problems are the worst…
The problem is, how do you fix it if you can’t make it break?
The worst thing is when somebody comes to you saying “yeah, I had this problem yesterday, but it’s working now”.
this is a case for excessive logging man
likely won’t help you actually fix the issue because miraculously you didn’t log the three variables you actually need but it’ll make you feel better in the meantime
Cosmic radiation could always wreak havock by simply switching a 0 to a 1. It appears The Universe is Hostile to Computers.