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Ah, yeah, I almost forgot about that. I remember students who were frustrated because of some mystery error that plagued them for hours, only for me to take a closer look and figure it out in 5 minutes. It forced me to rethink how we taught students how to read error messages, figure out line numbers and stack traces, and how to ask Google for help.

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I think you just need to rethink your feedback cadence

Well it doesn't help that the stack trace often doesn't follow anything but its own convention, much less the conventions of a basic English sentence. The fact you have to learn to read an error message is damning for whoever thought this would be a good error message, honestly.

It occurred to me a few years ago that the vast majority of my value as a programmer is the huge amount of trivia and giant set of heuristics I’ve picked up in years, and years, and years of work. Almost none of which came from formal education, training, anything like that.

That’s the stuff that gets me unblocked much faster than a newbie, and lets me spot shortcuts and connections and opportunities that save sometimes months of work. That stuff’s what lets me scan an exception message and stack trace fairly quickly for the one or two pieces that matter, even in some unfamiliar environment.

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