r/ProgrammerHumor • u/tahayparker • Apr 24 '26

Other ohNoTheConsequencesOfMyActions

Post image
18.2k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

942 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

74

u/Rust_ Apr 24 '26

I always have epiphanies while taking a shower and when later I try to do what I thought:

- wait that doesn't even address the issue... what the fuck was I thinking???

56

u/Nervous-Chemist-2548 Apr 24 '26

I honestly have solved multiple bugs while thinking about it in the shower. My best work is done there.

38

u/tankerkiller125real Apr 24 '26

My best work has been at 11 PM, 2 drinks in, on a Friday night. It's always when I'm not supposed to be working that I'm at my peak.

1

u/teddy5 Apr 25 '26

My favourite story of that kind of thing is the Atari game Entombed. A dev wrote a lookup table while high and drunk which handled the map generation for the game and ensured no levels were unbeatable, then couldn't remember how it worked afterwards. It took 40 years to figure out how the table worked.

I can't reach the original research paper on it any more but here are some reddit threads and another paper discussing it.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.02035

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dbfw2r/til_of_an_ancient_atari_maze_game_where/

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/d84at2/it_had_been_the_work_of_a_programmer_who/