The beautiful phrase “Man, I am an idiot…”
How often do you have “Man, I am an idiot” moments? Forgetting to pay a bill on time, saying something stupid and regretting it immediately after, or chopping the tip of your finger off cutting red peppers? Yeah, gross… Well if I did either of those things I dont think I would be too happy but in the programming world ”Man, I am an idiot” is one of the things I like to hear most…
Today my team and I were plugging away, coding up a storm. We have some upcoming deadlines so we are all in crunch mode. The problem is that if I have done a ton of work that is all on a related task, I begin to make stupid errors. I dont know if that is normal but I need to mix up my tasks. A little of programming, a little of building gui forms, database work or whatever else needs to be done.
Anyways, what got me thinking about this is that today I had to give a hand to two friends that were having problems that they couldn’t figure out in their code. It never hurts to have someone else take a glace at your simple mistakes, the same two friends helped me figure out a problem in 5 minutes that stumped me for an hour. So for each friend, I go over, looking over their shoulder as we step through the program. I offer some advice or suggestions where I think the bug may be hiding and leave them to get it. Lo and behold, after 5-10 minutes after I left each of them I hear one of my favourite programming phrases: “Man, I am an idiot.”
I am not saying I found their problem but sometimes when we explain our code to other we read parts of it that you think are 100% fine and wouldnt think to check it yourself. I myself have yelled many a “Man, I am an idiot” to whoever is in earshot when I have a eureka moment. I love the feeling of overcoming a seemingly insurmountable error in ones software that turns out to be something a new programmer could spot. So today was a good day, alot was accomplished and issues were resolved. I hope to have more “Man, I am an idiot” moments soon as there are still alot of bugs 
What is your best ”Man, I am an idiot” moment?
P.S. The errors in the software I believe were that a regular expression wasnt being matched properly because of a missing escape character and the other had a simple SubSonic/SQL query problem.
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