Ask HN: Are you still haunted by bugs past? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you still haunted by bugs past?

2 pointsl00sed3 comments

There are only a few bugs physically haunting me.

But mentally... I'm haunted by almost every mistake I've ever made. Sometimes to the point of spending hours looking into ways to make sure it never happens again.

Especially now then I'm out of the big city and my life is 10x less exiting(More like 30x, actually). I wish I had done just a bit more, back when I was still doing stuff, not let myself get distracted by anything personal, and just generally appreciated things a bit more.

I was mostly generally fairly respected wherever I went, but every dev has times when they weren't at 100%, and really early on, when I was first starting, there were definitely a few days when I made pointless mistakes because my mind wasn't completely on my work.

But there really weren't that many of bugs per se.

The other big thing that haunts me are some of the personal projects I did, and the bad but workable decisions I made on early jobs due to NIH.

I still have a bunch of stuff in my parts bin that is almost trash. Several hundred dollars worth. I didn't really enjoy messing around with PICs all that much. I'm not convinced it was the most effective use of time career wise.

I don't know if I really benefitted that much from making a point and click game engine in VB.net.

I might have been happier if I had listened to people who said "Just use an Arduino" or "Don't waste your time even thinking of making GUI apps in C".

I'm afraid that I'll get pulled back in for a project that I worked on 3 years ago. To me it's embarrassing and frustrating to have to revisit old code and it's certainly a time sink to re-contextualize myself enough to figure out what I did wrong and how to fix it.

I guess I should appreciate some of the stuff that I did more, especially since it was early on. I just wonder if there's a point where you generally start making far fewer mistakes as a programmer...

Hearing you say that you're haunted by almost every mistake you've ever made tells me that you have a good conscience. I suppose our mistakes should be memorable because it's how we learn to resist repeating them.

I'm a Wordpress developer, and I didn't know much about Wordpress development < 2 years ago. I try to be diligent about testing code and providing ample documentation. However, even years after a site or a product has launched, I'm pulled back into the project to correct some mistake in a function's logic or some other such bug. Perhaps there are libraries that can help provide more rigorous testing.

How do you avoid getting bogged down fixing old code? Are there any other good tips and tricks for testing code and fortifying it against future breakage? Is it language-specific?

I wonder if there are any global rules that can help rookie engineers and developers avoid getting pulled back into old projects and old code. There's certainly something to be said about dependencies and updates in the world of Wordpress, and some obvious best practices to avoid those common conflicts.

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