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Programming @programming.dev MrOzwaldMan @lemmy.ml 5 mo. ago

The experience that made me hate programming, but that's all on me

Title before edit: I hate programming, why did i choose this field

TL;DR: Stupid mistake, made by hours waste.

Basically, I was extracting date from the SQL db, and it was not displaying. I tried everything, heck I even went to chatgpt, and copilot. Two and half hours of trying every single thing under the sun, you know what was the issue?

SELECT task, status, id FROM mainWorkSpace WHERE user_id = @user_id

I FUCKING FORGOT TO ADD 'date' TO THE DAMN QUERY. TWO AND HALF HOURS. I was like, "Ain't no way." as I scrolled up to the query and there it was, a slap in the face, and you know what was the fix?

SELECT task, status, date, id FROM mainWorkSpace WHERE user_id = @user_id

Moral of the story, don't become a programmer, become a professional cat herder instead.

116 comments

The best advice I can give to new developers is "question your assumptions".

"But I set that variable" - did you?

"It should default to 0" - is it?

Remember - if things were working as you think they are then your code would be working.
You didn't add the date field to your query and couldn't work out why it didn't return the missing field for over 2 hours?

Perhaps SQL isn't for you as things get waaaaay more finicky than that.
In those kinds of situations you need to remember to try to break the problem down into simpler sections to identify where the problem lies. One of the first steps would be to run SELECT * FROM mainWorkSpace WHERE user_id = @user_id and see if that returns anything.
You tried "everything" for over 2 hours but never tried the "*" selector?
The difference between experienced devs and non experienced devs is that we have hundreds of stories like that under our belt. Hundreds of "Ah I wasted all this time because of a typo", and now we know to check for it.

It never stops. And after a while, a dev will share this exact scenario and you'll look back and share the same bit to them.
I’ve been a SQL dev for years. Last week I spent half an hour reading up on why wrapping a bunch of queries in a transaction was giving me incorrect results compared to when they were separate committed statements. I was investigating locking or what might be happening in the execution plan that was throwing it off.

Turns out I just fucked up the where clause. I didn’t even consider the schoolboy stuff. This kind of shit happens all the time.
This kind of stuff happens all the time IMO, we're human and not perfect 🤷‍♂️

I don't know how much of a help ChatGPT would be in this situation without access to your schema, at least with Copilot you can write a comment in the code explaining what you're trying to do and get some usable pointers in the generated suggestion (which takes your codebase into account).

I usually try to get a second pair of eyes on my code if something that seems relatively simple isn't working as expected... As you gain more experience these mistakes will become less common, and easier to spot
No worries. I’ve wasted more time on lesser mistakes than this. I also once made everyone an admin by forgetting a single ampersand. That was a fun eight hours.
You want to hate programming? Try using JS. It's anarchy.

"Why is this the way to do things?"

"Because it just is."
Real moral of the story: STATIC TYPING!

Seriously so many people think it's a waste of time, and then stuff like this happens.
Get yourself a debug rubber ducky mate, talk to it when you are troubleshooting might fire off a coupe more pathways to identify the problem sooner.
At least its 2.5 hours and not 2 years because of writing h instead of H
We’ve all done stupid stuff like this. The trick is to pad time into estimates to account for it :D
I do this, too. The only remedies I know are a walk or a colleague's fresh perspective.
Sucks bro. You’re in good company tho
What did you asked ChatGPT? I tried it and straightforward said that the date field wasn't included on the select statement

https://chatgpt.com/share/80918db9-5284-4a9b-b971-dde78b00497a
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CFRhGnuXG-4

Watch this. I have found that this makes it way easier to debug shit, is more readable, and cuts down on mistakes.
One of the hardest issues to troubleshoot is a bad assumption. Be glad you only spent 2 hours on this.
Every bug is an opportunity to learn. Learn about the language, the code base or about yourself. Today you learned about yourself.
I'm pretty sure chatgpt caught mistakes like these for me recently and in the past. Just always slap in all your code into the prompt and tell it what you want the code to do step by step. Like with rubber ducky debugging.
Programming: not even once!
The reason the date is not in the output is because you didn't include a date column in your SELECT statement.

If you want to include the date in the output, you'll need to add a column that contains the date to your SELECT statement. For example, if you have a column named "created_at" or "date" in your mainWorkSpace table, you can add it to your SELECT statement like this:

SELECT task, status, id, created_at FROM mainWorkSpace WHERE user_id = @user_id

This will include the created_at column in the output of your query.

🤷 Gpt, first try. I don't know what you asked.
I'm a coder and I like my job. It just has to fit with you. You have to be zen and like fiddling around with stuff. How did you even learn to write all of that if you hate it so much?

There's a book called what color is your parachute you might like.
When I have problems like this, I start to question whether I can program at all and whether I should perhaps change my profession. This often happens when I'm tired or overworked. I make stupid mistakes and assume that the cause of the problem is something complex.

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