Between yesterday and today, I spent about 6 hours working on a single bug, the first time in my relatively-short programming experience in which I’ve done so. For clarification, it’s probably best if I describe my app before I can describe my bug and my fix.
Shortly after college I was lucky enough to find myself in an incredibly unique and interesting position as a video compression engineer contractor for a large global tech company that will go un-named. My time there was filled with learning a variety of different skills, but the main one that stuck out to me was programming little scripts in basic using the Notepad app to draw in and run various other scripts that had been created by someone much smarter than myself. The layout and format was all fairly simple, but I found a strange level of joy in typing out a fully functioning script, even if they were very basic; it took me back to my days when I should have been paying attention in AP Physics but I was delving into the code on whichever little TI-83+ game I’d downloaded that past weekend. When those little games caught on and multiple classmates were becoming virtual text-based-adventure crimelords, I was the only one who’d gone into the programming and figured out what made it tick. Running through the code seemed simple, and I quickly learned how to modify it to get myself extra health and money. My friends kept asking me to modify their games with cheats as well; I was their king, the king of the nerds, and all of the virtual wealth in the text-based world was at my feet.