How To Fix Bugs

A talk for new programmers. My attempt to tell you all the stuff that will seem like common sense to you in two years.

This presentation is not very useful without the full text, which you can read at https://gist.github.com/jorendorff/8008765 .

Transcript

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2. How To Fix Bugs
   Jason Orendorff ~ @jorendorff
   

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3. What not to do
   ~ Feel discouraged
   ~ Smush the code around
   until it goes away
   ~ Fix it without
   understanding
   

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12. What not to do
    ~ Feel discouraged
    ~ Smush the code around
    until it goes away
    ~ Fix it without understanding
    

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15. How to fix bugs
    ~ Get steps to reproduce
    ~ Make a test case
    ~ Get more information
    

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16. How to investigate
    ~ Learn to read a stack trace
    ~ Dump the data
    ~ Tie off loose ends
    ~ Work backwards
    ~ Learn the tools
    

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17. Writing debuggable code
    ~ Check in the test
    ~ Look everywhere for the same mistake
    ~ Write debug methods
    ~ Write assertions
    ~ Make it obviously correct
    

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18. good hunting
    

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