> I'm constantly surprised and confused as I make my way through code. Reality contradicts my assumptions at every step so I need the ability to see that to fin

> I'm constantly surprised and confused as I make my way through code. Reality contradicts my assumptions at every step so I need the ability to see that to find my way to the bug at all. This is a huge point that a lot of people miss. When I was a junior dev working on some shrink wrap software, I’d submit a change for code review, and my stickler boss would read it and then say “have you single stepped through the main path of this code yet?” I found this annoying, but he made me do it, and god damn it if I didn’t often encounter situations where the code apparently worked, but I caught subtle errors by watching the state change one step st a time. “Oh my god, this value is never even looked at and I’m getting lucky it never fills the buffer on subsequent iterations!” It’s very, very eye opening. It became clear that it’s hubris to read a piece of code and assume I can interpret it faithfully. The debugger gives you another picture of reality.