I think that the major challenge in understanding debits and credits is that different accounts have different 'signs' that may seem counter-intuitive.

For example, if you earn money (get revenue) this is something that you would typically consider 'positive', however revenue is a credit account and so the earning of revenue is actually a credit.

A simple trick is to recognize that balance sheet accounts have signs that align with our intuitive understanding of positive and negative, whereas income statement accounts are flipped. To grok why that is gets a little more tricky and the linked article seems to give a great basis for understanding that.

Source: I'm a Canadian CPA, CA (and CBV) and soon-to-be software engineer. I think this helps understand both perspectives.