42 Methods of Flawless Fail-Safe Fixing

Being a software developer is tough. So, if you’re ever in a pickle, and hopefully not one to do with pickling, here are some suggestions to help you fix the issue.

1. Fix by feature. It’s a feature, not a bug.
2. Fix by coffee break. But sir, the code’s compiling…
3. Fix by force. Have you tried turning it off and on again?
4. Fix by deployment. Well, it worked on my machine…
5. Fix by forgetfulness. Wait, what bug were we talking about?
6. Fix by accuracy. If it won’t pass the tests, the tests won’t parse it. Can’t fail the tests if there are no tests.
7. Fix by deprecation. Just get an RTX 5090, bruh.
8. Fix by time travel. We’ll delegate this problem to future me, sounds good.
9. Fix by blame. This is clearly a bug in the library, not my problem.
10. Fix by extrapolation. If it works for this input, it must work for any input.
11. Fix by paywall. If they have to pay to access this, then no one will realise it’s broken.
12. Fix by fantasy. Wouldn’t it be nice if this bug were fixed?
13. Fix by firewall. I wonder why all those complaint tickets stopped?
14. Fix by mathematics. By my calculations, this bug is unfixable.
15. Fix by futility. Repairing this code would take far too long…
16. Fix by JavaScript. These frameworks suck, what if we just created our own?
17. Fix by commit. If the commit message says it’s fixed, it must be fixed.
18. Fix by adverts. Cover the broken content with endorsed NSFW advertisements.
19. Fix by homogeneity. If none of the code works, then none of it’s broken.
20. Fix by NullPointerException. sudo rm -rf
21. Fix by merge conflict. There must be some combination of code in there that works.
22. Fix by threading. What if we used multithreading to speed up the code?
23. Fix by virus. If we infect the software with a virus, then they won’t be able to tell it’s broken.
24. Fix by inheritance. This problem was inherited from another class, so it’s outside our scope.
25. Fix by stack. Have you tried making it serverless?
26. Fix by facade. If we just show them a video of it doing the right thing, we can avoid actually coding anything.
27. Fix by fable. There was once a monk…
28. Fix by pay2win. Just pay someone else to fix it for us.
29. Fix by duct tape. There’s nothing duct tape and a screwdriver can’t solve.
30. Fix by frontend. If the user can’t navigate this annoying UI, they won’t find any bugs.
31. Fix by code review. We have 69420 5-star reviews on the App Store, so it must be good!
32. Fix by catch. except Exception: pass
33. Fix by encapsulation. As long as we wrap all this spaghetti code in a class with one method, we’ll be good to go.
34. Fix by dogma. Sorry, dog ate my code.
35. Fix by open-source. Someone will open a pull request eventually, right?
36. Fix by statistics. This bug is negligible at the 50% significance level, so we reject its existence.
37. Fix by startup. Hey, founding a startup sounds like a good idea!
38. Fix by failure. Failure is the true path to success.
39. Proof by denial. Our program is perfect.
40. Fix by duck-talking. Moan about the issue to the duck, and it’ll magically resolve itself. Trust.
41. Fix by artificial intelligence. Have you tried adding AI to it?
42. Fix by definition. #PRAGMA fixed=true;

Inspired by 36 Methods of Mathematical Proof.