Debugging can be hard. It would be nice if the software we wrote (or are just using) always did exactly what we expected it to do, but the truth is that sometimes it just doesn't. Bugs crop up, weird things happen, and things need to be fixed or troubleshooted. Here's a story about some troubleshooting I had to do yesterday, and what it made me realize.
Wonky Things Happening With Our Wii U.
As a programmer, the type of debugging I normally do related to my own code and applications, but in this particular situation it was not my code; it was the Wii U. A friend of mine had just set up the internet connection in his new apartment, and we want to play Smash Bros. online against other human players. On the main settings page it seemed that the Wii U was connected, but when starting the game we kept getting a strange error popup with a message about how the system's country code didn't match up with the Network country code. We checked the country settings. I even changed to a different country and then switched back to United States- didn't help. We reset the router, went through the Wii U's connection tests, and everything checked out fine. I ruthlessly googled the 102-2502 Wii U error, but I found no answers. It seemed we were doomed to play with the old cpu players. And then I tried something crazy.
The Eureka Moment.
There was a time setting on the Wii U, but we didn't think much of it. It was displaying the correct time, and besides the error message said something about country code, not time. "Eh, let's try it and see what happens," I though out loud to my friend. I changed the time so that it displayed the time one hour earlier than it actually was, and magically... no more error messages! How could this possibly fix our problem? And what the heck was the underlying issue for which this could have been a workaround?? I still don't know why it worked, but it did. And because it did we had good fun time smashing real-life homo erectus noobs in Smash Bros.
The Bigger Picture
The key takeaway is that software won't always make sense to you, but you have to try to make sense of it. Sometimes you need to challenge your underlying assumptions (like how you should set the Wii U time to the actual time) in order to make progress. Instead of just banging your head against the wall, observe what is happening, where you want to be, and what you have in front of you available to work with. Theory doesn't totally go out the window when debugging, but if you get the system working as expected you are then in a better position to make sense of it. Debugging is an art. Being able to think outside the box and attack things from different angles is a valuable talent for becoming this type of artist.
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