Bug Fixing Is Actually Fun!

You heard me right. And I am not fooling around, there’s no one behind my back forcing these words out my mouth. Bug fixing is actually fun.

In my work I prefer tasks needing bug fixes rather than creating a new feature in our project. New features demand too much time analyzing what needs to be done, what alterations to be performed on the database, unit tests to write, and ensuring the design meets the company’s standards. Bug fixing on the other hand is like a game of cat and mice. And you get to play the role of the cat, which is kinda exciting.

At first it’s scary, like searching for a needle in a haystack of codes, but done right, you’ll be able to get the hang of it. First of course, you need to replicate the scenario reported, need to see the error yourself. Then read the error message. What exception was thrown? Where? Which file? In my experience, I always see NullPointerException as the number one culprit. Others were ConcurrentModificationException, and other Runtime-related errors. Go to the line of code that was reported. Often times, the line number shown from the log wasn’t always the culprit. In such case, I like to spread little crumbs of logger to log between each process and see which one of my little evil crumbs would not get printed. Then I’ll do the necessary fixes to let it work again and spare the whole team the headache.

Funny and challenging it might seem, you wouldn’t want of course to fix thousands of bugs in your project in the long run. Better to practice writing clean codes and study bug-preventive measures. If dealing with a huge codebase, have your codes be analyzed by code inspectors like Sonarqube or Codacy. These platforms continuously scan your project for any code smells, vulnerabilities, or possible bugs just hiding in plain sight. The warnings and red-marked results might annoy you at first but trust me, it can really save your ass a great deal of fixing.

You wouldn’t want your hard-earned project go downhill with just a simple bug right? Then do the necessary steps needed. Don't whine around and tear you hair, instead smash those bugs all the way!

Happy coding!