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War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged

All of a sudden, without any ostensible cause, Google Docs was flooded with errors. How it took me 2 days and a coworker to solve the hardest bug I ever debugged.

When I was on the Google Docs team, we did a weekly bug triage where we’d look for new issues and randomly assign them to teammates to investigate. This is less helpful than it sounds, since we often wrote browser-specific Docs bugs that affected only one of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. I added as many esoteric features as I could, copy/pasted a bunch of stuff into Docs from news websites to try to trigger the issue, played around with tables for a while.

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