I'm currently debugging an experimental prototype for Location Based Access Control. As usual, debugging can be quite annoying.
The meta-gland of my head just realized how the frustration of this normal phase of development can be fixed by improving a bit your tools or data representation.
In my case, I've got a number of Access Points to represent in my simulations. They come from a dataset for location-aware applications. Each of them is represented by the mac address, which is reasonable. But it's really difficult to understand what happens if you identify everything with a semicolons and hex string! Adding a set of mnemonic identifiers has been a matter of minutes.
As a meta-thought, this is exactly the concept of evolution. Your body or brain is not good enough for your task? It gets improved, and you get better at it. This applies to software as well.
In a sense, this justifies the huge complexity of software: we are humans, but — for what I heard, I don't know a thing of this topic — our DNA contains instructions for growing gills and wings. We have a perfectly useless tail, hidden in our bottom. Probably that was useful once upon a time (or maybe it's useful, and I don't know it?). In a similar way, my VIM editor supports architectures which are gone since long time. And today's Web replaces, with new abstraction layers, functionalities we already had before.
Enough with overthinking :D let's fix this damn' bug with some magic.