While we're swapping war stories and tall tales, here is the chronicle of my hardest bug:
http://www.evanmiller.org/winkel-tripel-warping-trouble.html
http://www.evanmiller.org/winkel-tripel-warping-trouble.html
I spent three days in coffee shops with a pen and paper taking first and then second derivatives of the Winkel Tripel formula
I felt bad for you reading that. There are loads of tools to do it automatically (matlab, wolfram, etc).I also spent several days churning formulae in bars. Got a lot of weird looks.