Google the Error

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You pore through page after page of stack overflow answers and questions until you find something that feels like it matches your error. It appears to be a result of some strange data structure thingamajig going on in your code you’ve been noticing. You find one post where someone complained three years ago about having exactly your error word for word. It actually has an accepted answer saying that he probably accidentally iterated through a list of arrays referencing some NaN’s where it’s expecting a reference or some nonsense and there’s an easy fix. There’s even a reply ‘Thanks, that was it!’ The database in this legacy code is garbage and was obviously written before Pandas was popular. Looking for a bug in this rats nest is going to be a mess. What do you do?

  1. Look for the type of error shown in the stack overflow
  2. Rewrite the entire database to make it easier on yourself

You additionally find a link to a meme post on r/Programmer Humor.

  1. Go to the meme

Published by B McGraw

B McGraw has lived a long and successful professional life as a software developer and researcher. After completing his BS in spaghetti coding at the department of the dark arts at Cranberry Lemon in 2005 he wasted no time in getting a masters in debugging by print statement in 2008 and obtaining his PhD with research in screwing up repos on Github in 2014. That's when he could finally get paid. In 2018 B McGraw finally made the big step of defaulting on his student loans and began advancing his career by adding his name on other people's research papers after finding one grammatical mistake in the Peer Review process.

3 thoughts on “Google the Error

    1. I’m so sorry, last choose your own adventure story I spent a day trying to figure out how to turn off the email notifications on hidden posts and wordpress has just made it impossible

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