Last week I made a real low-level fix to my code in order to optimize it for a product we sell at our company that is trying to ship “real soon”.

Well, this fix wasn’t going to get much testing, so I knew that if it introduced new problems, and if I didn’t find those through my own testing, things could be bad (as in, tens of thousands of customers’ software crashes and we get support calls costing even more money).

So, I GROANED late yesterday afternoon when I was doing my last bit of testing (everything so far had looked good), and suddenly something pretty simple quit working! In my mind, I thought “Oh crud, if this is a new problem I just introduced, and I can’t figure it out by tomorrow, then I might have to work this weekend and miss the U2 concert and the Aggie game and visiting my best friend growing up who I haven’t seen in months.”

The problem was a tough one, so this morning I went to Mass and asked St. Joseph to obtain for me the grace to figure out the problem. I also offered a decade of the Rosary for the intention so our Blessed Mother could help, too.

Then I went in to work and began debugging the problem. Another developer from the product involved with this bug came to help me, and as we looked at the bug, it appeared that my worst suspicions were realized: the problem occurred in part of the code that my changes affected, yet everything mysteriously looked fine in our trace statements.

I kept thinking, went back to another test machine, and then God put together a few thoughts in my head, along with a memory of something that a developer did 3 or 4 YEARS ago that could be connected. I had a theory, so I tested it out, and BOOM! that was the problem. It was a bug that had been there for 4 years and only now was found, AND it wasn’t in my new code, so I was off the hook.

And then I went to adoration and thanked God and St. Joseph profusely!

(Really, Bono, if you are reading this, you gotta play “40″ as a song of thanks to God for his grace and love (and plus the G loves that song)).

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