Let’s talk about our moments of shame. The “bugs” You spend hours on, to finally realize it is actually not a bug, the problem comes from you.
No worries, it happens to all of us, just turn these moments of shame into moments of humor and self-derision. Believe me, it is better to laugh about this type of situation.
The first time I encountered this situation was obviously during my first year of college. We started learning to code in C. So here I was, working on an exercise with my dear friend and lab mate, Elise. We were adding our lines of code in a file, and compiling it step by step to see if the result was correct. Then we had an issue with the output. So we corrected it. Compiled. Still not working. Change again. Nothing. Added some debug lines to be sure the code was running. Nothing.
Elise and I stared at each other, not believing what was happening. We thought the computer was going crazy, it wouldn’t even print our debug messages. At least that should be working.
Our only hope was to ask for some help. We ask our classmate Damien. When I think of CS students, I see someone like Damien. He was a gamer, crazy about Metal music. And definitely a genius in basically everything: Computer Science, Math, English… And yet, he was very friendly and helpful with us throughout the years.
As I was saying, we asked Damien for help, he looked at the code, it seemed fine to him. He compiled. Nothing working. Here, he checked something very basic that we didn’t even think about: the name of the file we were compiling VS the file with the latest modifications… IT WASN’T THE SAME NAME!!!
So basically we were coding on a file, and running another one. Nothing was ever going to work! We felt ashamed and at the same time, we laughed so hard about our silliness.
This was the first of many many many stupid errors, and it still happens to me nowadays.