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Also, when you're using 3rd party proprietary code, you don't get the option of fixing it. So delving into it can feel silly.



But there are often times when you can trick it into doing what it’s supposed to do.

And a really targeted bug report can often get a bug fixed pretty quickly. Several times I’ve been working at a place where the goddamned IP lawyers were so power mad that I could not file a patch for a bug even though I knew how to fix it, but filing a bug with an exact line number and description of what’s wrong with it can get it fixed anyway.

Filing a razor sharp bug report seems to be a rare skill, but if you can learn it your quality of life is better.


10 points for tricking it. often times its not completely broken, but may have been written with different assumptions, be failing on an avoidable edge case, or have an issue with a dependency.

knowing and deciding you can't reasonably fix it is a much better position to be in than shrugging and hoping it gets fixed in a later release, trying lots of versions or trying to refactor around it.




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