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I liked this article a lot. A programmer found a bug in something he uses every day, and learned enough to fix it. I think articles like this are very useful
by clay_to_n 11y ago
I liked this article a lot. A programmer found a bug in something he uses every day, and learned enough to fix it.
I think articles like this are very useful to beginner/intermediate developers. Everyone in software says "write open source code", "make pull requests to code you use" etc, but there's a very big gap between knowing how to program and knowing how to track down, fix, and submit a PR for a bug in a program (and language!) you've never worked on before.
This is a good little tutorial on ways to attack a bug in a program. I especially like that he starts with two print statements - there's no wizardry here, just a programmer digging into a bug.
- sanderjd 11y agoAbsolutely. I think articles like this are the best way to demystify some of the stuff that seems a bit magical in working software. Things that look complex are rarely the product of genius, but rather of a long string of practical and sometimes painstaking, but fundamental logical problem-solving.
- atom-morgan 11y agoI agree. I was recently working with an npm package that wasn't behaving as expected. After some debugging on my end, I was convinced I was using the library as intended. So I started digging through the source code, wrote a few console.log()s, and found the issue. The check for a property in the code didn't match the property name in the README. A simple issue to fix but one that seems much more attainable if you know how someone worked their way to that point. A few years ago and I doubt I would have taken the time to dig. Maybe I should write up a blog post like this one..