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How I Solved Three Weird Bugs
From compiler issues to Rube Goldberg machines, engineering is sometimes not as scientific as you’d like to believe
Software is complex, and in many cases, complicated. Even simple systems can have a lot of moving parts that interact with each other in mysterious, unintended ways.
If you’re lucky, these interactions don’t cause serious issues.
If you’re unlucky, they do and you get a bunch of errors.
If you’re very unlucky, you don’t get any errors, letting the issue fester for years while it stealthily wreaks havoc on your data.
Here are just a few of some of the memorable bugs I’ve seen over my career.
“This report crashes my computer”
My project manager sent me an email saying that a user had reported their computer crashed when downloading a report on an internal enterprise web application I worked on.
Weird, I thought. Errors in generating a CSV report shouldn’t crash the computer — the user must be mistaken.
After digging into it, it turned out that the computer did crash. Well, specifically, the browser hung. End users don’t care about the difference between their computer not working…
