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Ask HN: How do you get better at debugging/finding a solution?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at debugging/finding a solution?

#31

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

spiffytech wrote: post #22

Something I read forever ago and can't find a link for: Keep a debugging journal. Take notes on every step you take and its results. It's easy to go in circles because you forget what you tried or forgot some detail of its outcome. Seeing a summary of what you already know helps you rule out possibilities and inspires new ones. I often forget to do this or feel like "I can handle this bug without a crutch". Yet every…

I find this useful also, especially with new technology where I may not already have a good mental model of how it works.

I generally use Notepad++ and it's often just a set of notes about the value of important variables in certain files @ a particular line of code or at a particular time. I find that seeing that big picture at a glance can often give me immediate insight into what's happening. Something you can't always see when you're focused on a few lines of code in a method.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at debugging/finding a solution?

#32

Post by eof »

tl;dr rely even more on others in the most transparent way to constantly get unblocked as quickly as possible. Don’t let your ego stop you from learning something.

I’m grunching this thread. But I have 20ish years of experience and consider myself a decent debugger and considered enough so by others that I’ve been asked this line of questioning while in a mentorship role on a number of occasions.

The number one thing is simply humility; asking the dumb question in the smartest way you can, as quickly as possible, to the person who can most likely give you the best answer.

As you’re learning and starting out, you may not have great resources for such, but within most orgs you should be able to find where the answers are, and first ask the dumb questions (caveated by what you do understand), then eventually ask for a brain dump.

It is through the accumulation of tons of disparate idiosyncratic knowledge that little clues and common patterns emerge that allow people to sniff out a root cause hypothesis before the facts are even in, and often be right.

But people who hide their ignorance, refuse to ask questions that may make them look silly, refuse to be the idiot in the room, they learn much less quickly because they don’t get unblocked as quickly.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at debugging/finding a solution?

#33

Post by davidatbu »

spuz wrote: post #23

If you often find yourself requesting help, ask yourself "what would X do in this situation"? I often find I can anticipate the questions a colleague would ask me when I present them a problem I'm facing. Sometimes simply trying to answer those questions will reveal the solution. Good questions for any problem are: * When did this start happening? * What changed between when it was working when it stopped working? *…

100%. Perhaps this is due to my work being WFH, but my version of this is that I start typing on Slack to describe my problem, and further debugging steps I could take pop into my head.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at debugging/finding a solution?

#34

Post by broast »

The code your dealing with is probably deterministic. The answer is in the code. Read the code. Run a mental model. Use your creativity, imagine edge cases to the code you see, and investigate what would happen and if that is what is happening. Rinse, repeat.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at debugging/finding a solution?

#35

Post by sokoloff »

andrewstuart wrote: post #6

I've mostly worked alone as a developer. No-one is going to fix it but me. Actually I think I enjoy problem solving more than the actual programming. Though frankly programming and problem solving are so closely related they are almost the same thing. I can solve most problems I come up against day to day. I guess I can't solve them all because I do ask questions on Stack Overflow sometimes. I'm not sure why, I guess…

Came here to say versions of 4 & 5.

As a more junior programmer, I would sometimes resist the perceived effort or inelegance of the divide-and-conquer approach and end up spending much more time than needed to get to a solution.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at debugging/finding a solution?

#36

Post by [deleted] »

gigatexal wrote: post #19

I am struggling with this now, too. We've built a data solution on top of some highly custom dynamic dag building stuff off of airflow but the local run-me story is very tough and I've yet to get a debug session working which would be nice to be able to attach to a running container of it all. Not adding much I guess just saying +1.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at debugging/finding a solution?

#37

Post by spuz »

davidatbu wrote: post #33
spuz wrote: post #23

If you often find yourself requesting help, ask yourself "what would X do in this situation"? I often find I can anticipate the questions a colleague would ask me when I present them a problem I'm facing. Sometimes simply trying to answer those questions will reveal the solution. Good questions for any problem are: * When did this start happening? * What changed between when it was working when it stopped working? *…

100%. Perhaps this is due to my work being WFH, but my version of this is that I start typing on Slack to describe my problem, and further debugging steps I could take pop into my head.

Exactly the same thing happens to me :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at debugging/finding a solution?

#38

Post by luisgvv »

- Create a call stack map and write it down - This will give you an overview of which classes, functions, methods, paths are being used.

- People look down on console/logging, but it's useful specifically when there are race conditions or too many variables. It's way better to have several outputs and logs rather than a "standstill" picture you can only look while using the debugger.

- "Learn to debug" - This advice is thrown too vaguely around, but I'll tell you that the 2 essential pieces that helped me debug are 1- using watches to keep an eye on variables, props that are relevant to the problem 2- Use conditional breakpoints - About the 90% of the people I've paired programmed with don't know about it or even if they know it exists they don't use it and when I put in place some conditional break points they look with awe at how it can make a change.

- A somewhat counter intuitive or controversial advice: read the code involved and look for inconsistencies, dumb scenarios, flags, awful named variables and clean them! - Sometimes my attention span and memory range is entangled with garbage code that makes it harder to reason about. By throwing away the pieces I don't like and improving on them I get the benefit that in the future it will be easier to maintain and reason.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at debugging/finding a solution?

#40

Post by snarfy »

seanc wrote: post #11

This talk, "Debugging with the Scientific Method" changed how I debug problems. I try to watch it once every year or two. tl;dr, when debugging people naturally form a hypothesis about what is going wrong and then set about gathering evidence to support or refute that hypothesis. When you do so unconciously you are very prone to biases of all sorts, most importantly confirmation bias. When you do so mindfully, and Wr…

The biases are probably the biggest road block. You make an assumption of what is wrong and start looking in the relevant code. There thousands of if statements that all start somewhere at the top ,creating a big fork. It's easy to get stuck when you are looking on the right side when the issue is on the left. Always understand that your assumptions can be wrong.
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