c/fix-my-code-friday

Spent six months writing SQL queries without using JOINs properly

I was doing everything with subqueries and temp tables because I thought JOINs were slower. A senior dev looked at my code and asked why I was making things so complicated. Has anyone else realized late that they were missing a basic tool the whole time?

2 comments

harper_murphy•1mo ago

Just spent $15 on a rubber duck debugger and it actually helped

I grabbed one of those little rubber ducks off Amazon after reading about rubber duck debugging in a forum post, thinking it was silly but worth a shot. Stuck explaining my broken loop to the duck for 10 minutes and spotted the off-by-one error right when I said "index starts at 0" out loud. Anybody else have a weird tool that ended up saving their code?

2 comments

park.iris•1mo ago

Debugged a loop that ran 10,000 times instead of 100 in my Python script at 3am on a Wednesday, cost me my whole dataset

I was sitting in my laundry room with a laptop on the dryer, watching my results pile up wrong for 45 minutes before I noticed the range() call said 10000 instead of 100, and by then my CSV file had 9,900 extra rows I had to manually clean out, so what do you guys do when a sneaky off-by-multiple error wastes your time like that?

2 comments

michael895•1mo ago

Getting tired of people praising single-threaded speed over everything else

I saw a benchmark last week where an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X totally smoked an Intel i9-14900K in multi-core work by about 22%. But then everyone in the comments kept saying single-thread is what matters for gaming. I run deliveries and logging software all day across 32 threads and that speed difference saves me real time. Has anyone else found that real world multi-thread wins get ignored way too much?

2 comments

campbell.robin•1mo ago

Watched a friend's Python script fail silently for 2 hours because he forgot a single comma in his SQL query

That moment when he finally spotted the missing comma between column names convinced me to always pipe my database queries through a linter first (I mean, I was skeptical before, but now I run one every time), has anyone else had a dumb syntax error eat up their debugging time like that?

2 comments