A stressful bug

December 19th, 2009

Yesterday I spent hours reading through foreign code that I wasn't familiar with to find a bug. An email had just gone out to 4000 students letting them know that they could view who their new roommates and suitemates in the dorms would be. But about 5 percent of them couldn't because no one caught this bug. To be fair, the same code worked perfectly for fall quarter. I was the only developer at work because everyone else — including the code's original author (who we will call James) — was on vacation. Admissions was stressed and they put the stress on me.

Long story short the bug was found and fixed (Thanks for stopping by Firass, you were a lot of help). It turned out that James had mistakenly assumed that a slot in one of our classes contained a @property'd function when it was really a just a normal function.

It's always the littlest things that are hardest to find. My four hour investigation that ended with adding parentheses to the end of an if statement is perhaps less interesting than Louis Brandy's 8 hour journey to a single character. No hard feelings towards James though; everyone does some variation of this at some point. This is proof: James is a much better coder than I am and a whole lot smarter too.

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