IMHO, it is kind of fun to look back at your history in programming, and to laugh at all of the divvy moments and dumb mistakes you have made. So, in light of this, I thought it could also be fun to share some of these moments. Here are some of mine:
- Back when I was working on a game in python, I wanted to display a room. But instead, I displayed a rooom (note the spelling). Pythons IDE does not flag things like this, as variables don't have to be explicitly declared. I had to fight this for at least a week to find it.
Recently, in my OS, I made a bootloader for the El Torito spec, in the hope that soon, I may get the OS done enough to write an installer, and get it on some real hardware. However, all did not go according to plan, and for one of my functions, I passed a parameter (pointer I think) in DX, and a drive number in DL. This took me 6 months to work out, grinding kernel development to an almost complete halt.
I was working on a dynamically linked list in a text editor I was making (the project died, I made the mistake of not backing up before making major changes ^^), and I allocated on the stack. I'm sure many of you can see where this is going. On the free() function, used to delete members, it crashed. I rewrote the code, about 10 times, posted it on countless forums, countless times, and in the end, thought to myself, this is going nowhere. Left off it for about a week, then all of a sudden, while I was at the park, staring into space, it just clicked!