I recently started searching for a “forever home” and found a compelling posting by You Need A Budget. They are searching for a Humbly Confident Senior Full Stack Developer. One of the questions required to complete their application is the seed for this post.

Briefly (no more than a few sentences) describe a proud “debugging” moment you had, where you found and fixed a bug.

Is there such a thing as a proud debugging moment? My bugs usually involve missing punctuation or a reversed boolean comparison. Two experiences sprang to mind, and they need more than a few sentences to explain.

The first one was an integration API for Microsoft Great Plains not behaving. According to the manual, I was passing all the required information. The response from calling the API disagreed. I opened a support ticket with Microsoft. Collaborating with a support engineer confirmed API misbehavior. I also learned of a workaround to achieve my goal.

The second one was a sluggish inventory system. Over several hours of use, response times grew longer and longer. After a few days, our team started to notice a pattern. Rebooting the main network switch immediately restored system performance. Ultimately we discovered that the Network Operations folks had shipped a “Los Angeles router” to our New York City store. A sales transaction, on the first floor in NYC, routed through the factory in LA before returning to the NYC basement. This routing creates a local DDOS attack. Tweaking the routing table of the main switch resolved our sluggishness.