Cat Debugs For Life

Content How to fix any computer The Oatmeal http:theoatmeal.com Windows Step I. Reboot Did that fix it? No? Proceed to step 2 Step a. Format hard drive. Reinstall Windows. Lose all your files. Quietly weep. Apple Step I. Take it to an Apple store. Did that fix it? No? Proceed to step a Step 2. Buy a new Mac. Overdraw your account. Quietly weep. Linux Step 1. Learn to code in Ct. Recompile the kernel. Build your own microprocessor out of spare silicon you had lying around. Recompile the kernel again. Switch distros. Recompile the kernel again but this time using a CPU powered by refracted light from Saturn. Grow a gant beard. Blame Sun Microsystems. Turn your bedroom into a server closet and spend ten years falling asleep to the sound of whirring fans. Switch distros again. Abandon all hygiene. Write a regular expression that would make other programmers cry blood. Learn to code in Java Recompile the kernel again (but this time while wearing your lucky socks) Did that fix it? No? Proceed to step a n Step a. Revert back to using Windows or a Mac Quietly weep.

Content me sitting beside that one senior developer who always helps me with the bugs made with mematic ProdrammerHumor.io

The corporate hierarchy of bug fixing, illustrated as a chess game where nobody actually knows what's happening. The intern is confidently saying "Yes" (they fixed the bugs), the team leader is asking "What code?" (they don't even know what codebase needs fixing), and the senior developer who originally asked the question is responding with a flat "No" (because they know better than to believe anyone). It's the perfect representation of software development chaos where the person with the least experience is the most confident, and the person with the most experience has completely given up on expecting competence. The circle of technical debt is complete!

The dark ritual is complete! When production crashes at 4:59 PM on Friday, the PM and Tech Lead resort to ancient debugging practices—summoning the mythical CTO who hasn't touched code in 7 years but somehow remembers that one obscure config setting nobody documented. It's that desperate moment when Stack Overflow fails you, Git blame points to a developer who left 3 years ago, and your entire technical hierarchy transforms into a cult desperately trying to appease the elder gods of legacy code.

When your codebase looks like a conspiracy theorist's wall but somehow still works in production. Now some AI tool wants to "fix" it? Sure, buddy. That dependency graph is held together by Stack Overflow answers from 2013 and the collective prayers of three generations of developers. But hey, if you want to pay for an "enterprise agent" to untangle that beautiful disaster, go ahead. It's your funeral when it deletes that one undocumented function that's secretly keeping the entire billing system alive.

Four guys staring silently at engine parts is exactly what happens when debugging assembly code. You squint at incomprehensible MOV, JMP, and ADD instructions, desperately hoping someone notices the register that's off by one bit. It's like trying to read a novel where every letter has been replaced with hieroglyphics, and the table of contents is written in hex. The only difference is that car engines occasionally make sense.