Learn To Debug Properly And Ask Better Questions With Justin Samuels

How many of us still almost exclusively use console.log() when trying to debug something? It's okay, plenty of us do it that way, but you could be saving yourself a lot of pain and suffering by using the debugger and stepping through the execution.

There are several advantages to using a debugger, you get a tighter feedback loop, a lot more information, and it allows you to go into places you wouldn't have even thought about.

Now debugging can take you far, but there are times when we need another human to help us. Asking questions is anxiety-inducing, "what if this is something I should already know?" "am I being annoying?" "am I interrupting them from doing something important?"

The key is to remember that there is no such thing as a dumb question, but there are questions that haven't been thoroughly vetted. Stack overflow has an excellent wiki on asking good questions. Learn how to form good questions, and everything will end up being okay!

Justin is doing good work in bringing awareness to Atlanta's rich culture and advocating for people who are under-represented in technology. Be sure to check out the Render(ATL) conference upcoming in May 2020.

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Transcript

"Learn To Debug Properly And Ask Better Questions With Justin Samuels" Transcript

Quotes

"It's a good combo though. Computers, business, and teaching people, and passing on information. I think it's a trifecta, right? It's a killer combo."

"But I loved React, because I already knew JavaScript. So it was like, 'Hey, here's some tools that you could just wrap around your JavaScript and you could make things better.'"

"I feel like when you use the debugger, that invokes a curiosity. It allows you to go into places that you wouldn't have even thought about. It also gives you a sneak peek of what's going on underneath the hood."

"So you'll always have three lanes, I call it. You either know what you do know, or you know what you don't know, or you don't know what you don't know. And I'm like, 'Okay, I could get past the first two.' But the last category of you don't really know what you don't know is scary all the time."

"You have to learn how to formulate a question that engineers are going to be able to be like, 'Oh, here's your problem.'"

Resources

• The Power of Habit
• Atomic Habits
• Render(ATL)
• Stack Overflow: How do I ask a good question?

Justin Samuels

• Twitter
• Dev.to
• LinkedIn
• Stack Overflow

Joel Hooks

• Twitter
• Website