Bugs in your programs | Hacker News Reader

Bugs in your programs

blog.bloc.io

> As we learn to code, one of the most frustrating experiences we can have is finding bugs in our code.

Bug hunting can be a really fun thing to do. It's a challenge to (often) see beyond your own blind spot and use logic and reasoning to find the error.

TDD (and its kissing cousins) aren't a panacea, but I suspect OP's testing strategy is a little too thin or absent. Chances are if there is a test suite, it's not properly testing the entire code base.

Depending on the bug and the stress level, it can certainly be a riveting experience to search for an error deep in your own code. I find it's also an important source of refactoring for me, I take notes about what v2 will not be doing. Unit testing is great but it doesn't teach me to innovate or come across solutions I hadn't thought of before like genuine dirty bugfixing can do.

this post explains... that there may be bugs in our code and third party libraries and that if you fix them you'll improve as a coder.

I'm curious, who learned something from this post?

New coders may not really know the value of bug hunting. In a mentoring situation I would stress the bug hunting/fixing should be considered a challenge, not a chore.

it's intended for people who are learning how to code and may be unfamiliar.

everybody starts somewhere.

I learned to check the upvotes before clicking through. Again. Sigh.

For me I see coding as:

A) R&D/Learning - Code/hack out new ideas and learn. B) Production - Use known methods + what was learned in A to write production code.

For A, it seems that we can R&D/Learn all we like without TDD/BDD etc. Hack away. Get a proof of concept out. But please don't put that code into production.

For B, use something like TDD to assure robustness. I would also argue using BDD to assure coverage of system behavior.

I feel a majority of bugs in code is because developers stick stuff created in A into production.

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