TrickJarrett.com

Bugs are a central part of coding. And, honestly, how you debug, triage, and fix bugs is - to me - one of the most important things for coders. This morning I was alerted to an issue with my Pick'em, the leaderboard had mysteriously stopped updating.

I set in and began exploring to figure out the issue. My first assumption was the code which is used for generating the leaderboard, but that quickly showed that it was reporting what was in the database correctly.

Next, I suspected the scoring system, which after working through all seemed to be working correctly.

After that I went to the process for making a Pick on the site. And there was the issue. For some reason, a few weeks ago, it had stopped assigning picks to the current season (I call them 'Crowns' for players to avoid confusion with 'Seasons' for MLS, since we're now running multiple Crowns in a single Season.) So, why was it going wrong?

I began debugging, and suddenly in debugging, it began working correctly. As I described it to friends, "this is the equivalent of a mechanic fixing an engine by banging on it with a wrench." It shouldn't really work, but it did. I can only guess that somehow an out of date file had made it onto live and in debugging I updated it to the correct version, which fixed it.

Who knows. Computers are mysterious that way.

Edit: Also, I just noticed that the Glowbug bot that tweets out post reminders is finally operating as intended, which is that it deletes the previous bot tweet when it posts a new one. I no longer have to have the tweets cluttering my timeline.