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I never bothered to write down details of bugs... I rarely learn a lesson from any one specific bug - Lessons are learned by being exposed to a wide range of di

I never bothered to write down details of bugs... I rarely learn a lesson from any one specific bug - Lessons are learned by being exposed to a wide range of different bugs over many years. Eventually it becomes gut instincts. For example today I was debugging an issue with Kubernetes (it was a really cryptic error about client-server not being able to negotiate a protocol or similar). I had never used Kubernetes before and I couldn't find anything on Stack Overflow. The first thing I did was check the client and server versions (to see if they matched) - They did so that wasn't the issue. So then I had a strong 'gut feeling' that it was related to the client configs. In this case, my second hypothesis turned out to be correct. 5 years ago I would probably tested my way through 20 different hypotheses before finding the problem. To summarize my debugging strategy, it's simple; just pick all the low-hanging fruits first. The hard part is knowing what a low-hanging fruit looks like.

MattGrommes 11y ago
This is basically intuition, a base of experiences that leads to these "gut instinct" decisions and feelings. Doing a journal like the author describes could actually help with your intuition because you're adding more specific information from each bug into your mental storage. Now you're getting a cursory level of data from each individual bug which leads you to think each one is less important. It's like skimming 3 books on a subject instead of close reading 1. I'm just thinking out loud because I do what you describe here but I think the journaling idea could be valuable.
- vitd 11y ago
  FWIW, journaling has been useful to me. I've run into bugs and thought, "I know I hit something just like this before. Oh wait, let me look through my debug journal and see if there's something in there!" And often there is. It saves me having to do web searches or guess and use hunches. I can always fall back on those things if it's something I haven't seen before or is manifesting in a different way. I'd go even further and say that I've often wasted time chasing down a hunch that was completely wrong.
  - jondubois 11y ago
    This has happened to me several times as well (encountering a problem which I felt like I had encountered before on a specific project). It's a good memory exercise to try to remember when was the last time I hit that bug. At the beginning, I wasn't very good (and I couldn't remember the solution of the earlier problem - a journal would have been handy at that point) but after doing this for a while, now I almost always remember the solution to various regressions I encounter.

MattGrommes 11y ago

This is basically intuition, a base of experiences that leads to these "gut instinct" decisions and feelings. Doing a journal like the author describes could actually help with your intuition because you're adding more specific information from each bug into your mental storage. Now you're getting a cursory level of data from each individual bug which leads you to think each one is less important. It's like skimming 3 books on a subject instead of close reading 1. I'm just thinking out loud because I do what you describe here but I think the journaling idea could be valuable.

vitd 11y ago
FWIW, journaling has been useful to me. I've run into bugs and thought, "I know I hit something just like this before. Oh wait, let me look through my debug journal and see if there's something in there!" And often there is. It saves me having to do web searches or guess and use hunches. I can always fall back on those things if it's something I haven't seen before or is manifesting in a different way. I'd go even further and say that I've often wasted time chasing down a hunch that was completely wrong.
- jondubois 11y ago
  This has happened to me several times as well (encountering a problem which I felt like I had encountered before on a specific project). It's a good memory exercise to try to remember when was the last time I hit that bug. At the beginning, I wasn't very good (and I couldn't remember the solution of the earlier problem - a journal would have been handy at that point) but after doing this for a while, now I almost always remember the solution to various regressions I encounter.