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Funny. About 25-30 years I was experimenting with anti-fuse FPGAs. It was the era just after the appearance of HDLs (Verilog, VHDL) with the first synthesis tools. In an effort to put another weapon in my consultant background, I was studying Verilog. To check my progress, I reverse-engineered a complex peripheral (UART) of an MCU of the time, Motorola's 6805. That code was asked of me by a couple of South American students (I don't really remember which countries). One day, sometime later, an American wrote to me and asked if the code was still available. I gladly sent it to him. After two days he tells me he has fixed a couple of minor problems in the code. I synthesized it with one of the early versions of Symplicity, and I knew it was fine. So I asked him what tool he was using. He told me he had taken it to a Mentor Graphics workstation. I was amazed, as I thought he was another student. At that time such a workstation, equipped with the right software, cost no less than $250,000. Finally, he qualified as an engineer in the "Missile and Electronics" department of McDonnell Douglas.
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wow, these two comments alone of what people do and also use codeproject, wow, amazing.
ill be over here trying to map some sales order from XML to json with a few annoying business logic rules.
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Not to hijack the thread further, but I believe this is quite common. I was working on a government contract where we were required to develop two separate sets of equipment to support two assembly processes for two different customers of the same contract. There were two teams running in parallel and there were not supposed to share information between the teams even though a lot of the team members worked for both teams. When election season was over, all the top brass changed which changed the scope of the project. We were not allowed to discuss which customer was which and only refer to each process by the project code name. The development times were decadal, so senior engineers would retire and come back several years later to pick up where the last activity was cancelled and mothballed by the government.
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I believe you're right, in that this stuff happens all the time, always to the detriment of the taxpayer. I recall one I helped produce a bid package for - same product, two different military branches. Final day of proposal preparation, one branch sent us a new, 300 page spec change. We declined to play.
Will Rogers never met me.
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As a Waterfall organization, we are massive followers of the parallel development strategy mentioned above.
We are forbidden use fo the words "Waiting for ...X". Replace X with any activity that you choose.
You are allowed to develop non-sense that will need to be reworked when the above mentioned X is finally delivered. Then we are not allowed to say the "Re-Work" word as that would hurt our Powers-that-be's fragile feelings. SO we use weasel words like "Proof of Concept", "Preparatory Analysis", "Planning & Resourcing".
All that tomfoolery has happily sunk the entire batch of funding we sourced recently and I guess we now need to find another fine angel to see things our way.
Are our jobs secure? Absolutely, the gravy train has a lot of other skin in the game stakeholders, so I guess we may run a decade or so more.
You simply cannot sabotage your own job, its a feedback loop that will repair itself. Unless you do something criminal and intentional or dumb like declaring your intentions. You are simply not going to succeed in any such attempt.
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Nor can you code yourself out of it. No matter how much administration you give people over the data, there's always something new.
It's ok, that's progress.
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Something about no one ever got fired buying from IBM.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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Just talked to a customer today that we developed an application for 10 or so years ago. We didn't win the follow-on builds for political reasons. What I learned was that our system and the newer versions' learnings were scrapped in favor of "doing it better our way". Well, the first systems used FPGA/embedded devices. The current vendor is trying to replicate the embedded devices with the equivalent of a 386 processor running DOS. The application was precision load control running at 50kHz sample rate with a load fault detection time of less than 100us. Not very possible with non-realtime systems.
Customers will always want to have an application "their way" because Burger King said they could have it.
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My SVG code was failing where an if() was testing true when there's no way it should have been. Within the 2nd line of the routine.
Attempts to put debug spew, or otherwise in any way change the binary size of that routine would cause my device to enter a boot loop after flashing the firmware.
Hooking up a JTAG debugger didn't help either. Weirdly it did not fail in the same place in the code, but blew up a few lines later and crashed the debugger.
4 slightly different codebases on 3 different platforms calling this code and 3 were failing. One was working. The one that was working really shouldn't have.
The other 3 were failing as above.
Today I found the problem.
My stack was too heavy. There was just too much data on it, so I moved everything to the heap and presto.
I fixed this completely blind.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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honey the codewitch wrote: There was just too much data on it, so I moved everything to the heap and presto.
And the Witch says that like it's no big deal.
honey the codewitch wrote: I fixed this completely blind.
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes?
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
I’m begging you for the benefit of everyone, don’t be STUPID.
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honey the codewitch wrote: Today I did the impossible used my years of experience which allowed me to make some educated guesses about a problem, one of those guesses was accurate, and prompted a change that help fix the problem.
For some reason I believe this is more probable. 
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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This is the difference between a novice developer and an experienced one.
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You can't buy experience.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Harumph. The Red Queen thinks of six impossible things before breakfast! 
Seriously, Well done! Stack problems are among the worst problems to debug.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I tried to track down a screenshot for you of VS debugger sitting inside an if() where it couldn't have possibly landed based on the watch pinned right beside it.
It bugged me enough I dug at it a long while before figuring out how it happened even after just changing the code to make it work "right".
These are "fun".
In my case, it was based on string comparison to ''. The problem ended up being an unprintable character in the string. Finally found it by pasting the "empty" value into notepad++ with "show all the things" turned on.
String.IsNullOrWhitespace() for the win... but I don't think that existed then so I can still claim awesomeness. lol.
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Invisible source code. Lovely. It's one of the reasons I don't use Python.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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I try not to hate anything but Python is an exception
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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It destroys me the cool stable diffusion stuff is most all python.
I've poked and prodded and bent and banged around a bit. Playing with the guts would be way more fun if it wasn't written in nonsense I didn't have to divert focus to remember to stop hitting ; and pay attention to my CRLFs.
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I learned of “zero width space” through a similar frustration.
It seems hackers like to use it to make fake urls that are convincing.
E.g,
microsoft.co[zero width space]m
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Mine ended up just being a bit of line noise having ended up in a string that should've been empty.
For any given setup it was meant to be flexible, not necessarily caring which sensor ended up plugged in where or if any particular one was there at all aside some "core" functionality ones.
The rest was more a capture/log/present sort of deal with analytics to be done across what someone else decided mattered.
This bit of presentation, made sense to me to just iterate and if something was there, add it to the list of possibly presentable stuff. Since it was logged regardless, I could basically "replay" it to the presentation to figure out why something was going boom.
If you like the zero width space thing with URLs, you'll love this:
Bit flips in domain names - a new attack vector? - IT Security[^]
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I once had VS debugger say a condition was false when the C++ code continued like it was true. Turned out the VS debugger was using unsigned pointer comparison, whereas the code was using signed pointer comparison.
Debugger was technically more correct since signed pointers don't really make sense...
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Ok, that's cool. Can see where someone mis-Types as signed without thinking. I doubt my ability to stomach the long haul doing c/c++. So. Much. Stuff. Does endian-ness ever matter to you?
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jochance wrote: Does endian-ness ever matter to you?
No, normally the compiler handles endian for you. The only time you have to check endian is when you're doing network programming, and then you just call a function to convert to network-endian from native endian or vice versa.
Shouldn't even be using signed pointers, that's normally handled for you too... it was me messing up the code.
jochance wrote: So. Much. Stuff.
Yea, C++ got a lot, but if you learn it, you learn 80% of all the other languages. I'd recommend C# as a first language or for regular use, though.
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I cut teeth in GW/QuickBasic and just rode RAD from there.
Lots of "dabbling" though.
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Down memory lane we go ...
In my case we were using a GIS-system that included encryption of username and password in connection strings for SQL Server ...
They had implemented a variant of Ceasar chipher of their own design ... Unfortunately 'n' and 'm' ended up being replaced with a zero-width-character in Windows Latin1 ...
and having that at the end of the connection string turned out to be a rather bad idea as the full string seldom was marked in copy-n-paste 
Why 'n'/'m' was such a bad choice? Their default username was "admin" and the password was "Solen" (besides, passwords was case-ignorant).
and ... their system assumed that "USER ID" and "PASSWORD" allways was encrypted ...
and up we pops again
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