Alright, let’s talk about today’s little adventure. It revolved around ticket number 374. Just another number on the board, right? Well, this one turned out to be a real piece of work.
So, I picked up 374 this morning. Looked simple enough on the surface. Something about a button not working quite right on the old reporting page. Users clicked it, and sometimes, just sometimes, nothing happened. Classic intermittent stuff, the worst kind.
First thing I did was try to replicate it myself. Clicked that button maybe fifty times. Worked perfectly. Of course it did. Why would it fail for me? That’s just how these things go. So, I thought, okay, maybe it’s specific data, or a specific user permission.
I spent a good hour setting up different test accounts, digging through old data logs trying to find a pattern from the user reports. Found nothing obvious. The logs just showed the request never even hit the server sometimes. That usually points to a frontend issue, maybe some javascript hiccup.
So, I dove into the frontend code. Now, this part of the system is ancient. Built years ago by folks who aren’t here anymore. It’s a mess of jQuery and some custom framework nobody fully understands. I started putting `*` statements everywhere, trying to trace the click event. Click, check console. Click, check console. Over and over.
Eventually, I saw it. Sometimes, very rarely, another script was interfering. A really old script for handling some kind of popup notification that wasn’t even used anymore! It was throwing a tiny error, but that error was enough to stop the button’s script from running properly. Unbelievable. All this fuss over a dead piece of code.
Getting rid of it wasn’t straightforward either. It was tangled up with other things. Had to carefully remove it, test everything around it, make sure I didn’t break something else that relied on some obscure side effect of that old script. Took another hour or so.
Lessons from the Trenches
What did I get out of wrestling with number 374?
- Never underestimate old code. It can bite you when you least expect it.
- Intermittent bugs are often caused by weird interactions, not the main feature itself.
- Sometimes you just have to grind through it, clicking buttons and staring at logs.
- Seriously, delete unused code. Don’t just comment it out. Get rid of it.
So yeah, number 374 is closed now. Moved on to the next fire. Just another day, I guess. But man, tracking that one down was a journey.
