Sorry time: years ago I worked on a telemedicine web app before telemedicine was nearly as popular as it is today. Part of the application had patients filling out questionnaires online to show answers to the doctors. We were onboarding different parts of a large healthcare system throughout all this (cardio, GI, etc.) and each had questionnaires that required different logic for when and how to display the questions, so the application had a fairly powerful system for driving the conditional logic of when questions do and do not show up.
Well one day I am working on a new set of features to help support the new clinic that’s coming online and for whatever reason the question that should by all rights show up, does not. As I am getting deeper into debugging why, I pepper the code with nonsensical and slightly angry debug statements that show up alongside the questions. After solving the problem I happily clean up and commit the fixed code and move onto the next thing.
Well, it turns out I didn’t clean up all the debug statements. The statement I left in said I SEE YOU!!! in big red letters if you answered a particular set of questions in a particular way. This was discovered by a patient. Of the psychiatric clinic that just came online. On the questionnaire meant to evaluate paranoia.
Since then I have started using things like aaa and 111 as my debug markers.
The strings used for debugging at Google were supposed to include “DO NOT SUBMIT” which, a bot to check for this was added after a debug strings made it to production (It was before my time but I believe it was after the legendary WD incident- “western digital” was remapped to “woodly doodly” in test code that accidentally shipped for those curious)
When I worked as a technical writer earlier in my career, we had a debug/prod check: If you used a series of words it would fail you in prod (refused to build). These were usually codenames of projects and such.
One afternoon, I added the phrase "[Ww]ombo\s[Cc]ombo" (it supported regular expressions) and an expansion set (&prodbomb; evaluated to &wca; &wcb; to create "womb combo") but only in prod. In debug builds, it would produce "Wombat Combat"in bright red text.
This was a useful way to mark pages as "Don't build this in prod yet" - a habit some teams had of just yolo'ing their development branches right into production instead of doing a rebase to main. More than one build was saved by it within a few months.
Kinda verbose, ain't it? Just speaking from my own personal experience, usually when I resort to print-debugging I'm already pretty punchy and more likely to use a quick "ASDFASD" or similar.
I use the strings "XXX" and "999" for this (the latter because you sometimes need a dummy value in a numeric context), and have a global git hook which stops me committing a changeset which includes them.
I occasionally need to override the hook, for example when using mktemp -t, or when some floating-point data actually contains a run of 9s. But mostly, it is quite specific at catching stuff that shouldn't be checked in.
I worked on a codebase that had a special logging function with a name like NoPushLog that was just a direct wrapper of the base log function. A githook checked that this string was not in pushed code.
This solves many of the concerns raised in this thread about readability, automation, avoiding typos in the magic string.
The tricky thing you have to solve is how to push the code that defines the custom logging function, but there are solutions.
I always used the word "doberman" for this purpose. I've never written code for a project that legitimately included the name of a dog variety. A simple grep for "doberman" in the production release CI pipeline catches it. If one ever did slip thru I figured it wouldn't be too offensive to anybody.
Related in terms of being easy to search for, I use the abbreviation "TK" as a placeholder for text or incomplete code. Took this from the publishing industry (my partner worked in magazines) -- it's a combination that does not appear in regular English and so is easy to both see and to use search tools for.
XXX is already highlighted by most editors by default (or at least mine) and seems suitable. Any comment to be committed to a shared branch should probably contain more specifics and not contain that, if you wanted to institute a policy.
It's about writing code that your peers can read. "DO NOT SUBMIT" is clear as day. "ASDFASD" probably does not mean "this is a debugging string" to most people.
Not really? it’s close to the minimum string you’d be okay with never actually wanting to commit. Never had a problem with it in logs, but it could be in a comment next to the log if you did. Easy enough to add a shortcut for if you really have a problem typing it out, but at my typing speed my brain has always been the bottleneck, not the number of characters.
I was leading a startup development team in the late 90's and one of our developers told me that some very inappropriate test data had been sent to IBM to be included in a product demo and burned onto tens of thousands of discs that they would distribute.
Eventually it turned out that it was the single word "sheep" - which taken out of the relevant alt.* context was pretty harmless.
Talk about a moment when I thought my career had crashed and burned...
Likewise; they tried to pin it on me, and I had to go to the Git commit history to show it was another employee. My administrative leave was promptly revoked.
Pro tip: never add a "funny comment" especially an error message that's "never supposed to happen" unless you're happy with that message showing up in a board meeting, in front of your boss or worse (and it being traced back to you)
I did this once with the deliberate intention that be traceable. Holding down a few keys while clicking on a specific small set of pixels in an application we were developing for a customer would produce a specific message that was attributable to me personally. I did this sort of thing in most things I worked on back then, partially as a "calling card" and partially as a means of being able to prove my involvement in a given product if the need ever arose. This saved our bacon when a sales rep sent an "evaluation" copy of the nearly completed product to the customer, without authorization, that consisted of our entire source tree. (This was the 1990s and we were running MS-DOS, no file security)
Suddenly the customer tells us they have "repurposed" an "internally developed program" and they cancel our contract. The sales rep was upset that he would not be getting a commission on the sale and mentioned that he had "even sent them a demo", which led to the discovery of what had happened. My boss and I went to the customer's site to "finalize the paperwork", and when we were shown the application (which had extremely minor UI changes) I checked if the hidden click spot still worked, and it did! The customer was horrified. My boss was outraged.
We ended up getting paid the full contract amount plus a large bonus in exchange for agreeing not to sue. The sales rep decided to leave voluntarily rather than be fired.
I like the way you phrased this. Maybe someday academics will refer to Bullock's net the same way we talk about Occam's razor, or Maxwell's demon, today.
Listen. If it’s never supposed to happen then you definitely want a customer to tell you if it happens. Best way to make sure that happens is to insult their mum. It’s just good engineering discipline.
In my younger and more foolish years I worked for a company called Redgate and, whilst there, I had to do some licensing jiggery pokery that stopped people using our tools if the licensing code had been tampered with or removed.
I didn't want to make it too easy for people trying to crack our tools so, if such a problem were detected, the error message spat out to the console bore no relation to what had gone wrong.
By "bore no relation" I mean the error message would be one of a number of lines of dialogue from a scene in a House episode where House is trying to figure out who Wilson's girlfriend is... which led to this:
Yes, Greg Young (the event sourcing guy) ran into an error that said "Because I wanna ask you about your girlfriend. I must know who she is, or you would've told me her name," because he'd moved Smartassembly minus the licensing DLLs. Of course, he didn't realise what he'd done "wrong" so he tweeted it to his considerable following and it went viral.
Because I'm exactly the sort of walking cliche you'd expect I was blissfully unaware of the unfolding drama, being away on sabbatical snowboarding at the time. I hadn't taken my laptop with me, I'd disabled data roaming on my phone to avoid a whopper of a bill after a couple of months away, and had only a gen 1 iPad to access email and internet. So of course I came back in the evening to discover that it had all kicked off, with this ludicrous chain of emails where people were trying to figure out what was going on, until somebody had the sense to go and look in our source control system (which at the time was still svn for most things), and figure out that it was my fault.
People saw the funny side and it wasn't that big a deal but the reason I bring this up is that the last line of dialogue in that scene is, "Your mama," delivered by Wilson to House, and it was also the error message for the final failure scenario I was looking for. I'm glad that one didn't get printed.
Back in the nineties, 3D Studio used to be pirated by every kid in their dorm and more. The software had license checks all over the place apparently, but crackers tried to remove all of them.
However, if they missed one, it would move a random vertex by some random amount which is obviously very visible when rendering a 3D scene.
When people complained about this on forums (usenet mostly), they outed themselves for using pirated software.
System.exit(0); in Java is probably the most evil thing invented, when the license check fails (preferably launch a thread and do it without stacktrace, after a random time).
To this day I still think Google’s motto only referred to “Do no System.exit(0)”.
Sadly I mostly agree with this. File it with "the first time people get the password right tell them they failed, making them enter it a second time" and other janky but highly effective stuff.
I write alot of #![no_std] code in Rust and forgetting debug messages is luckily impossible because compiler won’t compile in the end if you forget something.
I did something similar years ago when working on a gambling site where people could upload bets in bulk using specially crafted files.
During development this would sometimes break but only in very specific circumstances, and because they were so absurd and seemingly specific to our local development environment I just added an error message saying "watch and amaze while the application eats itself!" Or something to that effect. It was inspired by an error I saw with the Discworld game for the original PlayStation.
Of course, once this hit production it turns out the det of circumstances necessary to trigger this error wasn't quite as specific as I'd thought, and support was overloaded by hundreds of people calling in to report the error, worried that their money was gone. Of course, people using these feature were high rollers placing very large bets, so management was not happy...
Fortunately I wasn't fired and we fixed the issue very quickly, but man I felt the edge of that sword really close to my neck. It was at one of my first jobs as well nearby 20 years ago. I definitely learned some valuable lessons that week. :o)
> I wasn't fired and we fixed the issue very quickly, but man I felt the edge of that sword really close to my neck.
The same experience. I was working for a pornography company and where I was configuring load balancers. I had a test page of semi-naked red deviless with the words "Hello Minion" above her head which I had forgotten to remove.
So during peak times, when the misconfigured LB went active it threw that page to the public, advertisers and the other white labelled websites.
I had a comment in this file for a very long time but the project lead was something of a Professional so he removed it. The comment was "# MULTIPASS!"
I handed a project over to a new developer once before leaving the company. I returned about 18 months later, and he'd stripped out the one Easter egg I'd put in. No sense of humor that chap. Good coder though.
> Since then I have started using things like aaa and 111 as my debug markers.
I often use my initials and "DEBUG", so that the string (A) is distinctly grep-able before committing code and (B) if it somehow ends up in production it's not totally mysterious.
> And if he isn't "annoying Steve" now he will be known as that soon enough :)
I once heard a guy — named Ed — who responded to a query about something with, "Well, I'm special." You can guess how he was referred to from then on ....
If you use language expressions that automatically become file/line info, that frees you from juggling unique labels. Then it can be saved into your IDE as a insertable code snippet.
It goes without saying that a real interactive debugger session is even better, but it isn't always convenient or possible.
Sometimes an interactive debugger session will make the issue you are researching not happen -- I don't know of a way of tracking down race conditions that isn't logging everything that happens until I find out which thing happened before which other thing that wasn't supposed to
> Sometimes an interactive debugger session will make the issue you are researching not happen
I still remember the first time that happened to me, I think it had to do with some (not yet diagnosed) race condition on a PHP server between the HTTP requests it served, and the debugger had a side-effect of blocking the next request while I was inspecting the first one.
That reminds me of another thing: Some debuggers allow you to set breakpoints and set them to not suspend or pause execution, but to emits a log-message to the debugger or terminal instead.
Those are an upgrade over print-statements in that:
1. You can't accidentally commit it and it doesn't show up to make your diffs weird
2. You may be able to dynamically change what things it prints out without restarting the program
And the reverse: I change values using breakpoints. So the code runs (because the breakpoint condition is false) but the value is different. Example of breakpoint condition:
Personally I use the word "MEOW" because
a) it's easy to search for and spot in logs
b) it will (hopefully) never be a legitimate string in the kind of things I work on
c) fairly unlikely to cause offence (unless the customer is a dog)
Hope you aren’t inspecting COM or DCOM data then. Those MEOW all over the place.
> The header of the marshaled object reference begins with a distinguished signature (‘MEOW’)⁶ [...].
> ⁶ A Microsoft Program Manager who shall remain anonymous claims that MEOW stands for Microsoft Extended Object Wire representation. The author, while somewhat gullible, is skeptical of this story but is willing to give the aforementioned source the benefit of the doubt.
MEOW fits in 4 bytes and the string is probably aligned on 4-bytes boundary (being at the start of the reference) So probably not a bad choice for a binary protocol.
Our testers (China and India) know that when they see KURWA or DUPA in logs that to send it straight to the polish site, we are considering adding a hook to check for those
I've definitely committed debug messages before. Probably everyone who writes code has at some point. Thankfully it's never been anything TOO embarrassing. These days I try to always do a git diff and search for "print" (or whatever the language equivalent is) before I commit and push as a final sanity check.
In high school, my friend had a habit of titling draft papers something inappropriate. Which was funny when we were peer editing each other. But inevitably, one time he forgot to change it back. We sat down in English class and as the teacher was walking around collecting papers, he glanced down at his and suddenly UH I GOTTA GO TO THE BATHROOM. He sprinted out the door straight to the computer lab and printed off a copy that didn't have a bunch of profanity in 24 point font at the top. I about died laughing.
I sort of laugh when using chatgpt/claude to code anything, if you ever mention to it that something isn't quite working right it'll pepper the entire code with printed debug statements rather than assisting you with any more advanced debugging methods.
I've worked with systems that were so utterly and entirely broken that the only way I could confirm that a particular code path was followed was by inserting an infinite loop and observing that the system then hung instead of crashing.
Combine that with a build system that is so utterly and entirely broken that the only way to be sure is to do a fresh checkout each time, and with a hardware set-up that involves writing the binary onto flash memory and plugging it into a device that is located under somebody else's desk in another room and then perhaps you have the Debugging Cycle From Hell.
When I was programming at home om my Atari ST I thought debuggers was the greatest invention ever. It was wonderful to be able to step through assembler code line by line, instead of looking at BASIC print statement output and guessing what was going on and where. Made life so much easier.
I guess that once you reach a certain level of coding, static verification, strong typing, solid unit tests, you only got timing multi-threaded Heisenbugs left to find...
What’s weird is that debuggers are so advanced now. rr and Pernosco are to regular debuggers like regular debuggers are to inserting an infinite loop into your code.
This is a hacking technique too -- I've seen it used for extracting entire databases via SQL injection by putting delays in SQL statements and then measuring how long the web page hangs, when you can't force any output on the page. You put different delays in for different string matches and eventually you can get all the table and column names this way.
I always use “elephant” as my debugging statement, since it’s unlikely to come up in the code and easy to search for when you need to remove it, and also pretty innocuous. If you’re writing software for zoos, you might want to try something else, though.
I once did the same except my debug message, created in a punchy mood late at night, was "YOU ARE BEING ATTACKED BY MOTHS." Left that in there and forgot about it until I received a very puzzled debug request months later...
CVS at my first job was configured to reject commits containing f-bombs after a spicy debug message sneaked into production and showed up in a children's game.
I thought a user facing error message like this is inappropriate, so politely took the issue upstream [1].
Lennart, who I had spent some time with in real life a few months previous, didn't yet have the reputation for being the person he is today. I thought he'd be pretty reasonable about it. Instead he closed the bug as "won't fix" and left the comment, "Sorry, but please don't waste my time, will you?".
I was pretty shocked by his response, I lost a lot of respect for him at this moment and then wrote a long ass blog post about professionalism of developers and appropriate language for user facing error messages.. but still, Lennart tainted himself and showed the person we now know him as. (Also, if you are reading this Lennart, fuck you).
Ubuntu ended up carrying a patch simply to remove this inappropriate language, I never checked if it was eventually cleaned upstream or if other distros also removed it.
EDIT: I just checked, and it was eventually removed in 2011 [2]
Based only on your post I'm confused. You better a person for including "weird shit" in an error message. But the on a pubic forum tell them "fuck you".
On the basis of profanity alone, your action seems far worse than their's?
I don't think it's funny , but I do feel it's entirely more palatable than "WOOPS SOMETHING WENT WRONG <cute_dog_picture.jpg>" scheme that Amazon and other dotcoms use.
Regardless, the Lennart tirade added into the anecdote really just convinces me that the anecdote is there purely for axe-grinding.
Because it's practically identical to "Something went wrong!" but different and unexpected, which makes it funny. I don't know. Can you really explain what exactly makes something funny?
> Are you, or have you ever been responsible for content end users might see?
Yes. I don't do such things because of curmudgeons like yourself. But as a user I wouldn't mind at all, and think it's funny.
What "reputation"? He's disliked by a very loud minority, the rest of us don't care. I will take someone like Poettering who's actively solving decades-long problems over a useless "professional" any day of the week. He's effective because of his bullish personality.
Either you know about his "reputation" or you don't.
Those that have never interacted with him don't care, I agree (I mean, why would they?). But those that have, i'd suggest is a minority that can tolerate him.. but ho-hum, neither of have statistics on this so we'll never know.
When I met and had discussions with him in 2007 he was mild and seemed to be constructive, i'd suggest his "bullish personality" became more prevalent with time.
I met him once in 2012 and ate dinner with him and Kay Sievers. I agree to your observation about "mild" and "constructive", and will extend by saying that he appeared to me as someone fiercely focused on technical challenges. Therefore the "please don't waste my time" bit further up the thread appears to me totally in character for him. Lennart is really similar to Linus pre-2018 in that regard.
He's doing that only because it's his job: his employer has an agenda (i.e. steering Linux fast enough and disruptively enough at a low level, so that serious competitors cannot arise), and he's implementing that agenda without a care in the world.
Would I personally take such a ruthless mercenary over more community-minded folks? No.
No, there's a strong correlation between leadership and being bullish. Because in order to get what YOU want done YOU have to advocate for yourself - other people won't advocate for you. Being stubborn is a type of advocacy.
People will claim it's unprofessional, and it is. The problem is that when other's are also unprofessional you can't convince them by being professional.
If you look at who moves up the social ladder fastest and retains their power the longest, they are typically hard-headed people. The have an almost unreasonable amount of confidence in themselves, and in many ways they are delusional.
However, I would argue such a personality is better than being timid. Ultimately, past the computers and the programs we are humans, and human effects come into play. Success is not just measured by correctness; it's measured by perception.
there is no simple way to dissect these inter-related statements, but from my point of view, no. Plenty of people here have dealt with serial abusers, which is being defended as "ends justify the means" above
To be clear there's a far, far gap between being abusive and being bullish. It's quite immature of you to make that leap and use that to paint me as pro-abuse to discredit my argument.
You could instead provide a real argument, not "well what you say is used to defend abusers!"
Yes, and famously Hitler wanted economic strength for his country. I guess wanting economic strength makes you Hitler? ... wait no, definitely not.
I don't have patience for these weak types of arguments. Saying nothing at all is free and easy, I would look into that more if I were you. Seems more your pace.
To be fair, my argument was taken in such a ridiculous and offensive direction I felt it necessary.
It's one thing to think I'm wrong, it's another all together to warp my argument to make me appear crazy. Or pro-abuse. Or whatever. That, to me, isn't in good faith and I quickly lose the motivation to be kind. I work under the assumption the people I talk to aren't stupid, they're aware of what they're doing. I won't extend pity or give people the innocence of a child. In my eyes, that is even more offensive.
Lol, at $work there is a big list of forbidden words, I was not aware of it until I created a pull request containing the phrase "bad packet". Turns out "bad" is in the list, along with stuff like "workaround", "hard-coded", and also a huge list of every slur and vaguely sexual term known to man, some of them oddly specific like "son of a motherless goat". Learned a few new words myself that day...
I remember reading a great story about someone doing embedded development who was doing something like download firmware onto a device and being told "Checksum is bad"...
After much checking it was realised that this was because the checksum literally was 0xBAD....
In some places, those lists are even more extensive as they include transliterations of profanities in all the various languages the product is ever localized in.
Sometimes this leads to embarrassing issues. I remember one case where a Chinese guy named Hui was unable to make a blog post on his team's official public blog. Turned out that his name was on the list of banned words because of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%85%D1%83%D0%B9#Russian
Why is "bad", "workaround" and "hard-coded" are on the list of blacklisted words? Sounds kind of dystopian; just because you forbid a word from the dictionary or remove it, it does not solve the underlying issue.
My guess is it's about client perception (and perhaps even admission of guilt).
My first encounter with this was as a young developer at an electronics manufacturing company. When discussing a request from a customer to change a particular undesirable behavior of the device, I referred to this as a "bug" in an e-mail to them.
I was quickly reprimanded / corrected, with the explanation that -- while "bug" is a somewhat innocuous term to engineers, to non-engineer types it brings to mind a whole host of bad images, fears, and can lead to canceled contracts under the premise that we've delivered bad-faith product. I was initially very resistant to this idea, but I've seen the wisdom in this as I've matured as an engineer over the past 20 years since this run-in.
For a related example, it reminds me of this issue that was opened on llama.cpp by a user who was concerned that the software had been "hacked":
> Hey, I was reading your Readme.md and I saw that your repo was hacked. I want to ask what this means and wanted to check if the users like me also get the impact of hacking. Or, this is not the thing I should worry about?
Of course, the repo was not hacked -- but the founder of the project mentioned that it had been "hacked together" (as a term of humility / self-deprecation) and some users got the wrong idea of what he meant by that.
So I don't think this is about censorship, so much as good public relations. "Don't spook the horses" -- not all words mean the same things to engineers as people whose perceptions of technology are shaped more by movies and headlines.
Dystopian for sure: I’d wager that if the code-base lives long enough and the pool of developers is large enough, they will start using Newspeak words such as “ungood” or “doubleplusungood” – or other synonyms for “bad” – to work around the blacklist.
You joke, but the phrase "black list" isn't allowed where I work. It contains "black," which has racial connotations. We use "block list" instead. I didn't realize the connection to Newspeak until now
Yes, a lot of dumb little "American political brainrot" like that has been getting pushed in places.
Another example is GitHub changing the default branch name from master to main due to their perception that the existence of a master implies the existence of slaves.
Electronics protocols are getting a newspeak renaming with sometimes humorous results when you see documentation where mass search-and-replace mangled a substring or they forgot to replace the bad words in all caps.
okay so as much as people like to meme on the whole banning blacklist/whitelist thing, it actually makes things clearer to just say blocklist/allowlist, especially for non-native speakers.
People got grumpy about master/slave being replaced with server/client, superior/subordinate, leader/follower, and similar terms but that actually largely benefits as well in that it makes things clearer. Anyone who has dealt with bus protocols that support the more complex "multi-leader" setups or peer-to-peer setups knows how the master/slave terminology can be confusing and potentially limiting in accurately describing the parts of the system.
And the git master/main thing also is more a matter of just making things easier to pick up. Master can be confusing there for the same reasons it's confusing in bus topologies. Main instead is obvious. It's the main/mainline branch of the project. And that also helps set the divide for main vs feature vs maintenance branches (and release tags).
So yeah some of it was done under the guise of politics but that's generally been more about getting an excuse to make the change without people dismissing it rather than the underlying reason for the change to happen.
I tend to not really notice whtever slight cleanliness/communication improvement any of these changes add (this is probably just a me thing).
So, putting politics aside, I don't really care as long as it isn't breaking existing stuff. My only point of contention has been the politics behind some of the pushes.
Aren't blocklist and allowlist strictly better as terms? Black and white (even ignoring the connotations) require at least one level of indirection compared to explicit terms that describe what they are
Lol I remember early in my career using "fuck" and "cock" a lot for debugging. Very quickly learned to not do that, I instead replaced it with "banana" for the most part
banana has been there with me from the beginning! There's something weirdly satisfying about this particular word - the spelling, the sound and just sheer siliness just has a calming effect.
I used to debug with curse words until I accidentally pushed one of those into the company's open source repo and then we went and did some `git push --force` to scrub it from history.
Now I just use my initials at the start of a debug line.
I remember a colleague leaving a debug popup "fuck is wrong with the data" in a product outsourced to us. Naturally it popped during the customer demo, in presence of someone like Germany's minister of something.
We had a good laugh; the dude was fired on the spot tho.
Yeah, someone did that at a place I once worked with the C-word in some JavaScript debug logs. Never put anything in the code, no matter how temporary, that you would be embarrassed to have appear to a customer.
Conditional breakpoints are essential, just run as normal and it'll only break when your bizarre edge case is hit.
Debugger.Break and Debugger.Launch are like a breakpoint that gets hit even when you're not debugging, and prompts you to attach a debugger. ( Launch won't pause if you already have one attached, but especially useful when you want to attach to a start-up routine in an IIS hosted web-app. )
Debugger.Write writes to a different output stream, and like all Diagnostic.Debug statements, isn't even compiled into release builds, so there's zero chance of it ending up in prod.
These are essential tools for rapid debugging. Printing nonsense and hoping to spot it feels 20+ years out of date.
There are endless numbers of cases where you can still end up having to just resort to print debugging, even in C#. Race conditions are a great example.
Yawn. I’m all but certain that all the environments in these “print debugging fail” stories have debuggers. The fact that generation after generation of programmers fall into print debugging, despite there being “no reason” to do it in many contexts for…decades at this point, should tell you that you’re missing something, not that everyone is dumb except for you.
I'm not saying people are dumb, I'm saying we've failed to provide good dev UX for debugging, so that people find it easier to reach for print debugging than leverage their debugger.
Cool story bro. Let me tell the guys at work that we should just run .NET on our multi-core digital signal processors.
And we should also teach them not to get their delicate timing out of whack because they'll immediately stop dropping incoming samples if any of them gets interrupted by a debugger.
Well one day I am working on a new set of features to help support the new clinic that’s coming online and for whatever reason the question that should by all rights show up, does not. As I am getting deeper into debugging why, I pepper the code with nonsensical and slightly angry debug statements that show up alongside the questions. After solving the problem I happily clean up and commit the fixed code and move onto the next thing.
Well, it turns out I didn’t clean up all the debug statements. The statement I left in said I SEE YOU!!! in big red letters if you answered a particular set of questions in a particular way. This was discovered by a patient. Of the psychiatric clinic that just came online. On the questionnaire meant to evaluate paranoia.
Since then I have started using things like aaa and 111 as my debug markers.