DEV Community

Cover image for Debugging: What's the Simplest Explanation?
Alex Morton
Alex Morton

Posted on • Edited on

Debugging: What's the Simplest Explanation?

This post was originally published on February 26, 2021 on my blog.


Friday already, this week really flew by, yada yada yada (the usual post intro words to get the writing flowing...)

It's Friday and we're here, doin' it live. I've been working all week on solving a bug, and I finally found a solution for it yesterday only to realize that the fix warranted a mere 10 characters or so to the changed file.

Yet again, I need to keep this idea in mind that the likely solution to any problem or bug is most likely the simplest solution you have on hand.

And yet, we don't think about that right when we go into investigation mode on a bug, do we? I think, for me, I gear myself up to do a deep-dive and learn everything I can about why something is happening to be able to really scope it way down and isolate the issue.

But once I do that, I think I need to ask myself, 'Okay, what is the simplest explanation and most straightforward approach to fixing this?'

Maybe it's not investigating how a certain instance variable is carried throughout the entire application's architecture and creating new functions to manipulate different variables.

Maybe it's just making sure to parse a variable to an integer and move on with your day.


Pssst! I send weekly newsletters about the self-taught coding journey and my own coding adventures (and misadventures!) Sign up here! >>

Top comments (0)