What's awful are those bad days when it's actually hours and hours of feeling like an idiot, draining you away, and then when you figure it out you still feel like an idiot because first off it was so simple and second of all solving something in minutes is not going to wash away hours of feeling like an idiot.
Luckily as I have gotten older I have gotten fewer and fewer of those days.
I learn to accept when I am tired and need to take a break. Sometimes hours of needling through code can be solved in minutes on a fresh brain. I used to be stubborn and wouldn’t stop until I had made some progress and that went on making a tired day into an exercise in frustration. Took a while to have the confidence to shut down and start fresh the next day.
This hit me real hard, thank you I need to become better at this.
Just had a few frustrating days at work, lo and behold problem solved elegantly in 1 hour on a Great Prayer Day where I was supposed to be off-work.
The simple solution was just writing out a truth-table and then implementing it using the new C# switch expression to make sure I had all combinations taken into consideration.
I once had an issue where it appeared my servers were leaking less than a byte of memory per request (WTF? less than a byte?).
It took months to find the bug. Turns out it started leaking once the filesystem quota was reached, the log tried to roll and failed. All logging messages were just building up in a queue. It was a definite face-palm moment once found, but yeah, took months to get there.
I had a similar issue w/ a high-res timer that was causing spurious socket timeouts. Only found because...logs were saying operations were taking +200 years to complete. That was about 6 weeks of time during development.
Luckily as I have gotten older I have gotten fewer and fewer of those days.