There must be something useful here…

Every now and then you get a problem that seems solvable and then, bam, no solution. Everything you do comes up failure. You ask for help in forums and on IRC and still nothing. You begin to question code, your experience, and everything else you have. You leave the project to clear your mind, but that doesn’t seem to help. Finally when you are back into the grind, you get a shed of light. You forgot to change a source file that you thought you had changed but turns out you didn’t. You have dug soo deep that you completely passed the problem and solution and have found magma.

I have had this problem before where I look for a problem at the core, when really it is something on the surface. I am talking about an instance where there was a perl script on Cron that was sending email at given intervals. I thought the problem was with the database or with data communication, when really it was with an issue with syntax. I had originally looked through the source file, made some changes, changed them back and then screwed myself.

The important thing to remember is that when a problem seems overly complex, get back to basics and you might find the problem. In the networking world, you would adhere to the OSI 7 layer model. In programming I would say stick to the things you changed first and then double check those items first.

To some of you, this will sound obvious, but I think it is worth saying. Well, good luck with programming and debugging.

Cheers,

Mike