- Writing a screen saver on Window NT 4. Starting the screen-saver blue-screens the computer. Rebooting + loading Visual Studio takes several minutes. After several days of this, it turned out I forgot to zero out the structure you pass into every Win32 Create function.
- Was assigned to modify some old Fortran code (never claimed to know Fortran, just got the assignment) a long time ago. Got weird compile errors, couldn't figure it out, finally just started taking things out of the line until it worked. Found out it failed if I had a line of over 70 characters. What?! Turns out some of those old things of Fortran were still around...
- Spent a week tracking down why my C++ code was my crashing, due to a variable magically changing values. I was using Curl, and one of the calls requires a pointer to long and I passed a pointer to int, and the compiler didn't complain. Got so frustrated I ended up stepping through the assembly code to see what was happening (which is how I discovered it). Not fun. (Also, the constant recompiling and dockerizing desoldered the nvidia chip on my 2012 MBP, so this bug cost me a lot of money for a new laptop, too.)
- 3D meshing algorithm isn't working. Narrow it down to a small enough mesh to print out vertices before and after in a tractable quantity. Stare at changing outputs long enough to identify the problem.
- Emscripten WASM wants to load async, but exported global function uses the WASM to do work and should not have to know the details of how the WASM gets loaded. Coerce that into working for the browser. Also needs to work on Node 20 (limitation of 3rd party package) which doesn't have fetch(). But webpack for the browser happens to convert modules that use a module with dynamic import to dynamic modules themselves, even if the import is never called due to a platform check, which leads to 'import { func } from "..." resulting in func = undefined. Aargh.
That's not even counting the reverse-engineering of OS function requirements due to incomplete documentation, API functions due to almost no documentation, and problems due to causes you didn't even know existed.
- Writing a screen saver on Window NT 4. Starting the screen-saver blue-screens the computer. Rebooting + loading Visual Studio takes several minutes. After several days of this, it turned out I forgot to zero out the structure you pass into every Win32 Create function.
- Was assigned to modify some old Fortran code (never claimed to know Fortran, just got the assignment) a long time ago. Got weird compile errors, couldn't figure it out, finally just started taking things out of the line until it worked. Found out it failed if I had a line of over 70 characters. What?! Turns out some of those old things of Fortran were still around...
- Spent a week tracking down why my C++ code was my crashing, due to a variable magically changing values. I was using Curl, and one of the calls requires a pointer to long and I passed a pointer to int, and the compiler didn't complain. Got so frustrated I ended up stepping through the assembly code to see what was happening (which is how I discovered it). Not fun. (Also, the constant recompiling and dockerizing desoldered the nvidia chip on my 2012 MBP, so this bug cost me a lot of money for a new laptop, too.)
- 3D meshing algorithm isn't working. Narrow it down to a small enough mesh to print out vertices before and after in a tractable quantity. Stare at changing outputs long enough to identify the problem.
- Emscripten WASM wants to load async, but exported global function uses the WASM to do work and should not have to know the details of how the WASM gets loaded. Coerce that into working for the browser. Also needs to work on Node 20 (limitation of 3rd party package) which doesn't have fetch(). But webpack for the browser happens to convert modules that use a module with dynamic import to dynamic modules themselves, even if the import is never called due to a platform check, which leads to 'import { func } from "..." resulting in func = undefined. Aargh.
That's not even counting the reverse-engineering of OS function requirements due to incomplete documentation, API functions due to almost no documentation, and problems due to causes you didn't even know existed.