You’re only ever done debugging for now.

I’m the kinda guy who owns up to my mistakes. I also strive to be the kinda guy who learns from them.  So I figured I would pass this on as some good advice from a guy who’s “screwed that pooch”

There was a project on which I was working, and that project sent me e-mail messages with possible problem alerts.  All was going well, and at some point I turned off those alerts.  I don’t remember when.  And I don’t remember why.  Which means I was probably “Cleaning up” the code.  It was, after all, running well (I guess.)  But along comes a bug introduced with new functionality (ironically a from somewhere WAAAAAAY up the process chain from my project).  And WHAM, errors up the wazzoo.  But no e-mails. Oops. Needless to say the cleanup process was long and tedious… especially for something that was avoidable.

I’ve since put the alerting code back into the application, and have my happy little helpers in place fixing the last of the resulting issues.

The lesson to be taken from this is that you’re only ever done debugging for now. Because tomorrow that code, thats working perfectly now, wont be working perfectly anymore.  And that the sources for entropy are, indeed, endless.

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