We all hit bugs that feel impossible to diagnose. The hardest ones to debug are intermittent or inconsistent. How do I fix what works sometimes? If a line of code always breaks then the fix is direct. The system is linear. The action leads to a failure.
How do I debug a bug that is intermittent? How do I debug something that works sometimes?
Here are some reminders to myself next time I encounter a baffling debugging session.
Does this sound familar?
Techie: We are drowning in technical debt!
Business person: Oh really! What is it costing us?
Techie: Oh, it’s not that. What I’m saying is the code doesn’t use best practices, there are alot of things hard coded and lots of spaghetti code. It makes the code really brittle.
Business person: But can we still deliver what we promised to Big Co Inc?
Techie: Yes, but we will have to do some workarounds. Working on the system is painful and what could have been a one day job will instead take a week. We really need to refactor!
Business person: Ah. That's good news. Our number one priority right now is Big Co Inc.
Conclusion: You don’t like your job because it is hard and/or annoying. I will tell your dev manager to ask you to work on the weekend.
Anki is an "intelligent" flash card system. When you review material it takes the "difficulty" you have in recalling the material. It uses this difficulty to predict when to review the material again. Thus material that you have already mastered is reviewed less frequently and material you are working on is brought back faster.
In an effort to learn Ruby at a deeper level, inspired by Derek Sivers, I downloaded his Ruby Anki Deck. The deck includes 476 cards. By default Anki gives you 20 cards to learn each day while mixing in old cards that are due for review. I found this a great way to be pushed to understand the language deeper.
One element of the Anki system is that you can create HTML/CSS/JS formats for the cards that you are creating. I did run into one gotcha. The card template editor has different javascript loading behavior than the card review system.
Since I was trying to load external javascript to handle the code syntax highlighting via highlite.js I needed to install the javascript boost plugin. To do this launch Anki, goto Menu > Tools > Add-ons > Browse & Install. Then just paste in the following code: 1280253613 Restart Anki and you should be rocking.
Next curl down the JS/CSS you are looking to use and place in the collection.media folder inside of: ~/Documents/Anki/{PROFILE_NAME}/collection.media/ Here is a great post with instructions on how to get any external javascript working in Anki
<link rel="stylesheet" href="_external/highlight.js.min.css">
<script src="_external/highlight.js.min.js"></script>
<pre><code class="ruby">{{Front}}</code></pre>
<script>
hljs.initHighlightingOnLoad();
</script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="_external/highlight.js.min.css">
<script src="_external/highlight.js.min.js"></script>
{{FrontSide}}
<hr id=answer>
<pre><code class="ruby">{{Back}}</code></pre>
<script>
hljs.initHighlightingOnLoad();
</script>