(Free)The Dark Side of being a Software developer

I was 26-ish when I started programming (I am mostly self-taught). After about a year, I was writing a program for a small marketing survey company, as a freelancer. It was my second paid work, and the first that was entirely written by myself. During the first demo, the customer asked me if I was sure that the program was correct. I said yes, with confidence. He pressed a key, and my program crashed.

Later I traced it to a bug in the implementation of switch/case in theLattice C compiler. For some values it did not go to the default case as it should have.

After...