Programmer's Instinct

I was in my Computer Graphics class that was about software rasterization. The labs were slowly building up to making a 3D rasteriser. We started from to 2D moved on to vertices and then to UV mapping. The day came when we had to near plane clipping. Near plane, clipping is essentially a way to make sure when a mesh goes behind the camera, that part of the mesh doesn't have to render. This makes the rasterizer efficient and gets rid of weird artefacts.

I was working on a lab assignment, my clipping was working to an extent. The texture on the cube I was rendering was getting messed up. The cube was clipping properly but I just didn't know what was causing the texture to glitch out. There was no certain way I could pause the program and just check the values. I did try to do pause the program but it wasn't working. I quickly realised that there was something wrong with my UVs. But I convinced myself that it wasn't the UVs and my general algorithm for clipping was causing the problem.

After looking and trying everything for 2 straight days, I decided to go with my gut and check all the places where my UVs were getting affected.

And there it was instead of 'v' I had typed a 'u' in one of the functions. If I had just gone with my gut in the first place I wouldn't have wasted almost 48 hours on one problem. There is truly something to a programmer's instinct. We work in a code base for long periods, often, we subconsciously know where the problem could possibly be residing. Always go with your gut first, it seldom steers developers in the wrong direction.