Question: What are the most annoying bugs you have to fix?

Adam Washington answered on 5 Feb 2021:

If I put aside my ego for a moment, the most annoying bugs are ones that deal with concepts that I don’t understand. Right now, for the past two weeks, I’ve been dealing with a “bug” in how our code handle atomic forcefields (basically the forces between neighbouring atoms). I put bug in quotes because the program is fine right now and gives the right answer. The problem is that, if another chemist comes along and has a forcefield that we haven’t heard of, they have to wait for me to add it to the program. So I’m trying to make it so that chemists can easily add their own forcefields without needing my help.

The problem is that the chemists who work on these forcefields every day think about them in a particular way. The chemist who started the software that I’m working on use the forcefields in a different way and has to make some corrections for those differences. By training, I’m a physicist, not a chemist, so I learned about the forcefields in yet another, different way, so I’m a bit lost trying to understand the forcefields AND the corrections.

I want to make it clear here that, although it’s three different ways of thinking about these forcefields, it’s always the same forcefield, just being thought about in different ways. Imagine being a waiter at a restaurant where the menu is just pictures of the food that people point at. Now a blind customer arrives who can explain to you in exquisite detail what the food they’re looking for tastes like, but they’ve never actually seen it. You’ve also never seen the food (besides the pictures on the menu) and you’ve never tasted the food either. All that happened in your training was that you were shown a bunch of recipe cards. You’re then left mentally going through those recipe cards, trying to figure out which one would taste something like what the customer is describing and then trying to imagine what that recipe would look like after you cooked it so that you can find it on the menu. You’re all talking about the same food, but it could be rather frustrating to try and synthesize the different experiences. Plus this place should really have a Braille menu!