3 min read
I got back from the office a little after 7 today... in the morning. Last night, hellbent on getting a bug fixed, I stayed overnight. To be clear, I don't get paid overtime and they encourage a work-life balance but I was too annoyed to leave.
Eventually all my officemates packed up their stuff and left kind of early since dinner wasn't served yesterday and they were presumably going to get something to eat. It was probably that way to get people out of the office since we had today and tomorrow off for Independence Day weekend. It didn't work for me since I can survive a weekend off of leftover micro-kitchen fruit and M&Ms.
The plan was to head back around midnight since that's usually the latest I ever stay. This bug wasn't going away anytime soon though. What's worse is that I had to brute-force debug it since it was one of my programs running on my machine, and another running on a machine on a cluster, which I still don't know how to debug efficiently or step through the code line-by-line like running Java code in Eclipse, so I just resorted to logging information. The thing is I don't know which side the bug is on.
Here's what debugging feels like for non-programmers
Eventually it became 2 am and no way I was walking back at that hour. I still wasn't much closer to figuring out the problem either. I tried what felt like almost everything and it just still wasn't working properly. Somewhere around this time I thought I heard something over my music. It sounded like the fire alarms going off on the other side of the floor. "Why would that be going off now? There's no one here!" I think they might have knew I was there and they were trying to get me out of the building.
The alarms went off several times and then finally stopped. I guess they gave up or were just testing them to see if they worked when there weren't people around to annoy. Around 4 am when I was coming out of the bathroom, I almost ran into a security guard who looked surprised to see someone at that hour on a holiday, but he didn't tell me to go home or anything so it was fine.
After many red herrings, dozens of recompiles and runs (and a whole lot of waiting around), I decided maybe my best plan of action is to make a group post about the bug since I saw many people who got the same error did the same thing. I tried a lot of their solutions and nothing seemed to work so maybe just asking would be a better idea than wasting another night on one bug.
The only other highlight of the week was College Colors day across all the offices. It's some kind of competition so we were sure to get a lot of people to join in for the photo. People who didn't have too complicated logos made them out of Legos. I already had mine from a month ago waiting on the display shelf.
I'm on the right side of my Lego UConn logo
I'm glad we had today off for the holiday so I spent it catching up on my sleep. Maybe I'll actually do something other than debugging tomorrow.