Doubt in Debugging

Doubt isnt fun. We want to have confidence in our direction and doubt is most powerful just when we need the courage to move. When we dont have the right amount of experience. But in a different light doubt is caution. An important guardrail against our inherent risk taking.

See on twitter

Doubt is probably the worst when were debugging. At 2am when were staring at the screen, completely out of ideas Should I even do this? Am I qualified? Do other programmers spend this much time looking at problems like this? I should have solved it by now!

Well. Yes. If you dont go through those feelings, then you probably didnt build anything interesting and arent dedicated enough to chase an issue to its conclusion. Yes, going to sleep is the best way to deal with some issues, but sometimes it isnt enough. Sometimes it isnt an option and sometimes I wont fall asleep until the issue is resolved. Doubt doesnt die when we kill the bug, you live to fight another day.

Why Debugging?

I dont want to talk about impostor syndrome, Im not a psychologist and have nothing interesting to say on the subject. I think its interesting that the point in which we feel it the most is a long and ugly debugging session. After all, there are many areas where it should creep during the day but when speaking to developers its universal when we debug.

There are many reasons for that but I think one of the core reasons is that we are impostors to debugging. We pretend to know how to debug but theres no taught technique. We didnt learn debugging in bootcamp or university. Maybe the step-over button and inspecting a variable. Thats about it. Look at the logs and bang your head against the wall.

Even as we try to fix the problems, we look at that process as taking out the trash. We hold our nose and run to the door. Trying not to breathe in the stench. Theres no technique. No learning. No joy. Just a terrible path we need to take. No wonder we feel doubt, we dont want to be here. We dont have the tooling to figure this out and were probably not really qualified for this.

Learning debugging techniques and embracing that process wont make doubt go away. Thats a fixture. But it will make it manageable and will reduce the time when it rears its ugly head. Solving issues quickly and effectively provides a level of confidence that only public speaking can rival.

I wrote about debugging a lot in the previous blog, e.g. with this series. Im redoing a lot of that work with the hope of reducing this particular pain and making debugging more accessible for all. Also, theres a book coming out, which you can preorder now

Im also working on a new course on the same subject to further clarify some things that are harder to explain in writing. It will follow a similar path to the book. I hope that in a small way it will help one of the big pain points I had as a young programmer.

I have a talk covering debugging techniques in a couple of weeks. The last time I gave it the reviews were pretty amazing.

A Solution to Twitter

On a different subject, with everyone going to mastodon (including me) Ive been thinking about improving the situation a bit. The first problem with moving to something like that is the lack of content. Many content creators dont post directly to twitter. When inspiration strikes we write to a buffering tool. This gets tweeted/posted at times that make more sense in the social network. Some tools are even smart enough to retweet recent posts so people dont miss them.

Right now the top tools are commercial and have lots of issues. None support mastodon. Id like to create a free/open source tool like that. Ideally something thats more hacker friendly and works with git. For this purpose I tried to work with the twitter API which is nothing short of a disaster. Its got several levels and versions. If you dont have the higher access level, then you cant use version 1.1 APIs. For version 1.1 we have twitter4j which is simple and excellent. But we cant use it without the elevated status of the developer account. It seems everyone responsible for elevating developer accounts was fired. Im also concerned theyll cut some permissions like that in the fight against bots.

The problem is that APIs dont work well with version 2. Even twitter itself hasnt ported media upload to version 2 so they expect you to use version one for images and version two for everything else. The documentation is plentiful and unhelpful for anything beyond the most basic use cases. Pretty frustrating. If you have experience with server side social networks and know what to do with this issue, then drop me a line.

Leaving Lightrun

On a more personal note. I left Lightrun. I joined the company as the first non-founder and wrote the initial implementations of the server, plugin and CLI. Its been a lot of fun but hasnt been as much fun in the past few months. Right now Im muling my options. I signed up to write another book which I just started on. Im also creating new online courses and working on a few OSS projects.

I also have an idea for something cool in the Java space. Im exploring that and might build it out.

I will speak at the ADDO conference, but if you listen to only one of my talks, please join me for my LJC talk. Its one of my better talks as I mentioned above.