Phantom Fix

I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that the system is working now. The bad news is that we have no idea why.

The above scenario plays out regularly in the life of a software developer, and it’s infuriating. In some sense it’s worse for a problem to disappear without warning than it is for the problem to persist, because without reproducibility it’s nearly impossible to determine the actual cause of the issue.

This happened to me after losing a big chunk of my Saturday night. Essentially the issue fixed itself after several retries. No idea at all as to why, but at least I could finally go to bed.