So, I spent a good chunk of my week playing this game. Not a fun game, mind you. More like that annoying ‘cat with mouse’ chase, but the mouse was a stubborn bit of code in a small project I was tinkering with.
It all started pretty innocently. I was trying to get this little script to pull some data, process it, and then spit out a simple file. Easy peasy, right? That’s what I thought too. Worked fine the first few times I ran it. Then, out of nowhere, it started failing. But only sometimes. Like, maybe one out of every five tries. No clear pattern.
The Chase Begins
First thing I did, obviously, was just run it again. And again. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Classic intermittent problem. The worst kind. You know, the type that makes you question if you’re just imagining things.
My next move: logging. I started sticking print statements everywhere. Like, seriously, littering the code with ‘Reached point A!’, ‘Got variable X!’, ‘About to do Y!’. I wanted to see exactly where this little mouse was hiding when it decided to trip up. And guess what? The moment I added heavy logging, the problem seemed to vanish. For a while. Ran it ten times, perfect. Removed some logs, thinking I’d narrowed it down. Bam! Failure again. It felt like the damn thing knew I was watching.
I went through the usual suspects:
- Checked the input data. Seemed fine.
- Looked for weird timing issues. Maybe some resource wasn’t ready? Added pauses. Nope.
- Read the code line by line until my eyes glazed over. Nothing obvious jumped out.
- Tried it on a different machine. Same annoying, random failures.
Cornering the Pesky Thing
This went on for longer than I care to admit. Felt like I was going in circles. You fix one thing, test it, seems okay, then the original problem pops up again later, slightly different. It’s like whack-a-mole, but the mole is invisible half the time.
Then I had a thought. Maybe it wasn’t my code directly, but something it was interacting with. An external service? A file system quirk? The script was reading a file, hitting a simple public data source online, and then writing a file. Pretty basic stuff.
So, I isolated each part. Tested the file reading separately. Solid. Tested the file writing. No problems. Tested the part hitting the external source. Ah ha. Sometimes, not always, the connection would time out or return garbage data. But it wasn’t throwing a clear error back to my script every time, just occasionally hanging or sending junk that my script wasn’t prepared to handle gracefully on those rare occasions.
It wasn’t some super complex bug in my logic. It was just… flaky external interaction. The mouse wasn’t really hiding in my house; it was occasionally nipping in from outside and causing chaos.
The Aftermath
Fixing it was then straightforward. Added much more robust error checking around the external call. Made it retry a couple of times if it failed. Made it check the returned data looked sensible before processing. Stuff I probably should have done from the start, honestly, but you know how it is when you’re just throwing something quick together.
It’s working reliably now. But man, what a time sink. Felt exactly like a cat chasing a mouse – lots of frantic running around, knocking things over, only to find the mouse wasn’t even that clever, just good at hiding in plain sight. Lesson learned? Probably. Will I remember it next time I’m writing a “quick” script? Maybe. Ask me next week.
