I think any software engineer can identify with the feeling you get at the moment you do the first run of the solution you have implemented that you are 100% sure has to fix it only to find nothing has changed.
Corollary: the relief/anguish when you discover that the reason none of your fixes have worked, nor your debugging print statements produced output, is because you were editing a different copy of the file than was getting built/run because you moved or renamed something and your editor didn't notice.
This reminds me of when I was trying to do Minecraft style chunking in Bevy. I was in a situation where (instead of doing the not-so-obvious fix) I threw parallelization, compiler optimization, caching, release flags etc. at my project and nothing made it go faster. I could not figure out why it was so slow. Turns out what I was doing was so unoptimized that I might've as well loaded the whole world per frame.
I was genuinely concerned that everything I was doing with mango and Pixman was going to turn out to be pointless. It wasn't, thankfully, there was a noticeable difference after introducing them. But it was a gamble for sure, because there was no smaller test I could really do to know it was worth it in advance - if I wanted to replace that DLL, I was going to have to replace the whole DLL because it was C++, the DLL exports were all mangled names for classes that all kind of interacted with each other, so I couldn't just cleanly replace one call and see that it was a good idea. I try to gather as much evidence as I can to back the idea it'll work before I make the leap, but I've learned that if you really want to get stuff done sometimes you just have to go for it and assume there is a way to salvage it if it fails
This has happened to me so many times. Especially in the distributed database I work on ... "hmm maybe I need to let the experiment run for longer, this data is noisy so it probably needs more time to show a trend line".
danudey|1 year ago
01HNNWZ0MV43FF|1 year ago
ramon156|1 year ago
You live and you learn :)
tomysshadow|1 year ago
finnh|1 year ago