true confessions

of degenerate debugging

In my head, I know good techniques for debugging, but time after time, my heart leads me astray.

I know:

1. isolate the bug to the simplest test case I can find
2. when doing something new, make minor and incremental changes
3. step through my code slowly

and most importantly:

don't just flail around making random changes based on my random hypotheses about what the problem is

But for some reason, I always think "this time is different". I know what my mistake must be, and I'll just change it and re-run. No, that's not it, let me change something else. I can make big changes to my algorithm at the same time I massively scale up and change the input source.

These are all lies.