> Debugging is an engineering discipline: You come up with a hypothesis, then test the hypothesis. Then you do it again. I like this - I've given some form of

> Debugging is an engineering discipline: You come up with a hypothesis, then test the hypothesis. Then you do it again. I like this - I've given some form of this advice, but I usually say: "you should call your shots in pool". You can flail about randomly and hope a ball goes in, but you won't get any better. You must be intentional, and train yourself to come up with and systematically work through hypotheses to get faster. This isn't getting better at programming - it's getting better at reasoning. In my mind, this is also one of the main value-adds of working on "useless" projects. The end product isn't the point, the debugging and problem solving practice is.