that's new, debugging in my sleep
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It was 7:44 AM, my eyes roared as a slit of light hit them, beaming from the only visible thing in that direction, the alarm clock. "Another 16 full minutes of sleep" said a small voice in my head. Turned out that those 16 minutes, would enlighten me, and the proceeding day, to a whole new level. It wasn't 1 minute past, when my eyes started to move, rapidly. In my dream, there were no characters, no people, no houses or trees, but a thing most familiar to me, my code. Franticly scrolling before my eyes, was the code of a project I was working on, a project that I was about to present in a mere 1 hour and 45 minutes. Suddenly the scrolling stopped. A breakpoint was added and after a swift compilation and execution.. i saw it. Thanks to my dream, I corrected a grave mistake that I would not have spotted otherwise. And a whole new to me, debugging in my sleep.
Ericos Georgiades
The one part of software engineering that gets annoying is once I get into a project, my mind is constantly designing, debugging, etc.. I've solved many a problem in my sleep or doing some entirely unrelated activity. Having said that, a few years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with the perfect solution to a problem I was wresting with. The next day, I quickly started implementing this brilliant idea. It soon became apparent that it was actually one of the dumbest ideas ever; not only didn't it solve the problem, it did so in a very complicated way and would have introduced even more problems.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke