After 5PM stop looking for a fix, start looking for a stopping point and write up some notes to review when you’re fresh again.

At 11:00 in the evening, there are two options for what they're dealing with. Either:

1. They have made precisely no headway whatsoever in actually solving the bug, or
2. They have fixed the bug, but the debugging made them go "---wait, how did that ever work in the first place?!"

If it's #1, odds are pretty good that there's a random debug step they put in at 9:08 in the morning that's screwing everything up now. If it's #2, odds are pretty good that it actually didn't work before, and now they've got to go back through the last six months of data and rectify it to fix that bug.

Ahhh just entering the phase where the bug is fixed, but everything else is broken.

The rules to remember when this is happening but before it gets that bad:

1. remember your own advice
2. have you tried turning it off and on again?
3. have you explained the issue to the ducky?
4. have you eaten?

Rule 1 is the hardest tho

More like:

11:00 in the evening: it's a simple bug, I can fix it in a few minutes

9:00 in the morning:

17:30 - This is a tomorrow/next week problem

This is why I take a late lunch every day. Every standup I’m like “I’ll wrap up this small issue from yesterday, then move on to something bigger…”

Usually the “small issue” is finally done around 4 PM.

Usually it’s just one character that’s wrong

I don't code, but I do work with a lot of really shitty proprietary software. The amount of time vendors haven't been able to fix their own shit is so high. Spent 6 hours on the phone once. Work 2.5 hours overtime for that call.

Just looking at that workspace makes my neck hurt.

And the official solution to this problem in the documentation is a library deprecated four versions of the framework and/or programming language ago.

I've had security incidents that go like this too.

...like more than a few.

I've had this experience and morning was like, "I'm gonna plan the trip of a lifetime to London and Paris and maybe Rome for a month or more."

Then in the evening I'm like, "well Vegas is a cheap flight, so if I spend a night in Vegas maybe I can go to Denver too?"

That's me right now. Just recently sent an issue report to Proton over the fact I have not been able to connect to their servers on my Linux running laptop for almost a week at this point and have given up on trying to self-disgnose and fix it on my own using what little skills I have and whatever information I could find through web searches. The worst part is how it effortlessly works perfectly on my desktop running windows 10.

However, she solved the more important issue that there was a post-it glued on top of the screen.