(thanks to Allison Kaptur for teaching me this attitude! she has a great talk called “Love Your Bugs.)

Debugging is a great way to learn. First, the harsh reality of bugs in your code is a good way to reveal problems with your mental model.

program: error: too many open files
person: I can’t just open as? many files as I want?. Interesting!

Fixing bugs is a good way to learn to write also more reliable code!

person, thinking: hmm, I should put in error handling here in case that data base query times out.

Also, you get to solve a mystery and get immediate feedback about whether you were right or not.

person 1: that’s weird…
person 1: oh goodness, that’s a lot of errors
person 1: I have an idea!
person 1: [coding a fix]
person 1: it works now!
person 2: great work!

Nobody writes great code without writing + fixing lots of bugs. So let’s talk about debugging skills a bit!