I Like Big Bugs

Sorry for the Sir Mixalot reference there. Ahem. Anyway, I just had a coworker walk by my desk and say something like, “Don’t you just wish we could get rid of all these glitches and be done with them?” She left before I could answer and I think it was rhetorical (it’s hard for me to switch gears to interpret social signals while in the midst of concentrating on code). My answer was going to, “Uh, no. I like finding bugs.” In this sense, I’d agree with what Nat Torkington twittered recently (edited for language, I try to run a PG rated blog):

acid test of whether I’m still a hacker: do I think “oh goody!” or “oh [skittles]!” when I find a bug?

Not only this, but a few years back I worked for a company, NRG, that shared office space with another company owned by John Devore. John and I were chatting one afternoon and we were talking about debugging things. He said that when he finds a bug, he doesn’t just want to fix it. He wants to know why he didn’t find it before: why does the bug work so well except here? That’s certainly my passion.

Debugging is an interesting opportunity to learn. Not only can you learn from the mistake, but you can then use that mistake to actually become an enhancement in the future if it happens to be interesting in some way. Sometimes, you can even end up turning a bug into a feature if it happens to do something really cool with a slight change.

Anyway, I just wanted to post that I enjoy debugging and when I get to the point where I say, “Ah crap” when I need to fix something, it’s time to switch careers.

Cheers.