What’s the most satisfying part of debugging for you? Finding the bug or fixing it?
Finding it. Definitely! It (usually) took so long to trace through the code that after finding it, the fix is easy (A is related to B which relates to Q which seems to point back to T which might change P…THERE YOU ARE! Aha! Now, let’s make sure you’re set properly…ta da!)
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I feel like discovering the reason for the bug is usually more exciting and thrilling, as the fix might be super simple. (If the situation is reversed, that suggests a serious design oversight.)
When I discovered CVE‐2024‐29052, it was a memorable process where I was going through platform documentation and thinking how odd it was that the playlists API had relatively minimal usage guidance when I’d expect to see a paragraph of disclaimers about what you’d need to do to successfully call that API without running into “access denied” errors. I’d taken the API’s presence for granted for years (due to its usage being discussed in the book Programming Windows Store Apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and assumed that due to its longevity from Windows 8, it should have withstood design scrutiny. But I’d never had an excuse to experiment with it as it was only relevant to media players. That said, I am a bit curious about the tradeoffs that were made when Microsoft fixed it, as they chose to break backwards compatibility rather than figure out how to accommodate applications relying on the original behavior.
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