Spent 6 hours debugging a Python script only to find I used == instead of = in a variable assignment

Started a simple weather app last Saturday and couldn't figure out why my loop kept crashing until my buddy glanced at my screen and laughed. Anyone else waste a whole afternoon on a silly typo like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

margaretj401mo ago

Oh man, that hit close to home. I spent a whole Sunday once trying to figure out why my temperature converter was always giving 0 degrees. Turns out I had "celcius" misspelled as "celcius" in one spot and "celsius" everywhere else. My code was just failing silently. Felt like such a dummy when I finally spotted it.

charlesanderson1mo ago

My buddy Steve spent three days chasing a bug in his weather app code. Turned out he hardcoded "8.0" for the API key version number but the server expected "8.0.0". Everything compiled fine, no errors, just returned blank data every time. He was checking his API calls, his JSON parsing, even blamed his WiFi at one point. His wife finally looked over his shoulder and said "is that supposed to be 8.0.0?" He said it was the most embarrassing fix of his life.