[Go Make Things] A formula for debugging (and asking for help)

By rahmat hidayat

Thursday, December 19, 2024

​ Today, I wanted to share a simple formula I use and suggest to students for debugging broken code and effectively asking for help from others… This is the behavior I'm seeing (include a screenshot or video grab). This is the behavior I expected to see (include a screenshot, sketch, or video). Here's what I've tried so far… {list of things}. Here's a reduced test case that shows the problem. I see a lot of requests for help online and on open source projects that say some variation of… This isn't working properly. Any idea why? Without any explanation of what was expected, how what they're seeing differs from it, or what they've already tried. That makes it incredibly hard for folks to help. I can recall doing this kind of thing myself, and for me at least, I was a lot more junior in my career and generally didn't even know where to look or what to ask for. This four-step formula can often help you isolate the issue yourself by forcing you to break down your code into smaller steps. And if it doesn't, you've given people a lot more information to help you get things sorted out. Cheers, Chris ​ Want to share this with others or read it later? View it in a browser.​ ​

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