Look through the code line by line

close up photo of programming of codes

This legacy code base is a beast, but hey, it’s your full time job and no one gave you a timeline for fixing this thing. You begin going through it function by function, line by line, looking for some obvious error. You wade through a sea of ambiguous comments and oddly labeled functions. Some functions appear to point to more nested functions in more nested folders; one more deep than the last. You just spent a few hours and have only scratched the surface. What do you do?

  1. Continue looking through the code line by line
  2. Google the Error
  3. Strategically add a bunch of debug logging print statements
  4. Ask the guy who wrote the code
  5. Try running the code again

Published by B McGraw

B McGraw has lived a long and successful professional life as a software developer and researcher. After completing his BS in spaghetti coding at the department of the dark arts at Cranberry Lemon in 2005 he wasted no time in getting a masters in debugging by print statement in 2008 and obtaining his PhD with research in screwing up repos on Github in 2014. That's when he could finally get paid. In 2018 B McGraw finally made the big step of defaulting on his student loans and began advancing his career by adding his name on other people's research papers after finding one grammatical mistake in the Peer Review process.

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