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The experience that made me hate programming, but that's all on me (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by MrOzwaldMan@lemmy.ml to c/programming@programming.dev

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Title before edit: I hate programming, why did i choose this field

TL;DR: Stupid mistake, made by hours waste.

Basically, I was extracting date from the SQL db, and it was not displaying. I tried everything, heck I even went to chatgpt, and copilot. Two and half hours of trying every single thing under the sun, you know what was the issue?

SELECT task, status, id FROM mainWorkSpace WHERE user_id = @user_id

I FUCKING FORGOT TO ADD 'date' TO THE DAMN QUERY. TWO AND HALF HOURS. I was like, "Ain't no way." as I scrolled up to the query and there it was, a slap in the face, and you know what was the fix?

SELECT task, status, date, id FROM mainWorkSpace WHERE user_id = @user_id

Moral of the story, don't become a programmer, become a professional cat herder instead.

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[–] ShaunaTheDead@fedia.io 41 points 5 months ago (3 children)

In those kinds of situations you need to remember to try to break the problem down into simpler sections to identify where the problem lies. One of the first steps would be to run SELECT * FROM mainWorkSpace WHERE user_id = @user_id and see if that returns anything.

[–] Enoril@jlai.lu 15 points 5 months ago

Was going to say that.

@OP:

One of the main skill a developer must have is being able to troubleshoot properly how their code behave.

Break your code in small pieces, check all of them with unitary test (formal or not) to validate their behavior then move to the next step. Never test everything in one shot or you will be overwhelmed by side effect bugs whom will distract you from the real root cause.

Being a programmer is not just coding but also testing and deploying (even locally).

That won’t avoid you being blocked by a silly mistake for hours, everybody did that at some point in their career, but that will reduce your frustration against yourself when you discover why the bug existed.

Do a pause, go walk, change the topic and the next time you look at your code, you will spot the obvious bug :-)

[–] MrOzwaldMan@lemmy.ml 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

In those kinds of situations you need to remember to try to break the problem down into simpler sections to identify where the problem lies.

Learned that the hard way.

One of the first steps would be to run SELECT * FROM mainWorkSpace WHERE user_id = @user_id and see if that returns anything.

It's one of those situations where if i write something, i forget it because it is doing its thing and about selecting everything, i should've done that and it's my mistake.

[–] ShaunaTheDead@fedia.io 5 points 5 months ago

You should read up on what's called "rubber ducky" debugging

Here's a link to a comic that summarizes the idea succinctly: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-rubber-duck-method Wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

[–] morbidcactus@lemmy.ca 9 points 5 months ago

If you're not familiar with the table, use a select top 10 * from table if you're on sqlserver, postgresql uses limit and oracle has fetch.

Don't recommend select * without limits or conditions unless you absolutely know the table, you can very quickly make a DBA unhappy