Vent: That week I spent 40 hours debugging a missing semicolon

Last Tuesday I crashed my whole project because I forgot a semicolon in JavaScript. Spent three full days scrolling through 500 lines of code before a buddy glanced at it for 30 seconds and spotted it. The worst part was my boss kept asking if I needed help while I was too stubborn to ask. Has anyone else wasted half a week on something this stupid?

3 comments

3 Comments

nancybailey6d ago

Did you try linting tools after that?

ben_ross516d ago

Does linting catch the kind of bugs where your code runs fine until 3am and then eats all your data?

nancygrant5d ago

That part about your buddy spotting it in 30 seconds hit close to home. I had a friend who spent an entire weekend rebuilding a database because he couldn't figure out why it kept crashing. Turns out he was using a reserved word as a table name. His roommate walked by, saw it on the screen, and pointed it out in like a minute. My friend said he just sat there for a while feeling both relieved and totally dumb. It's funny how the smallest things can trip you up the most, even when you're not new to this.

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