As software grows, one of the typical challenges is keeping track of the quirks and subtleties of all the languages, third-party libraries, frameworks, IDEs / toolchains or whatnot you, at places, need to maneuver in order not to construct everything yourself. That‘s often just a matter of familiarization and after you stumbled across a particular type of problem – once or a few times – it gets assimilated as a trivial thing. It sometimes gets so far as keeping certain warnings or harmless exceptions in your software – technical debt. (Alas, your customer doesn‘t usually care for the perfect product, or, let‘s say, wait that long and pay for the perfect product..).
Now, once in a while all the third-party implementations you rely on interact in a odd manner. These are the cases where you get a „Cannot update a component while rendering a different component“ in a React/Recoil application, a NoClassDefFoundError in a Java / Grails application, a general SegFault in a C / C++ program, or your database does weird stuff. U name it.
So even when you encounter a problem that your then, time is a critical thing. So what you do? Google it. Find fellow victims on Stack Overflow, GitHub, etc. – but this only goes so far, depending on how common your problem ist.
Now you should always have a version control system at hand, of course. This has the huge advantage of being able to simplify your problem. Just enter a new branch that no one cares about, and you can completely get rid of all the confusing mess that is your reliance on third party content. Of course, this is a possibility one can always know about. Point here being, do it as a habit. Learn it as a habit. If it‘s only in „deactivating this probably useless flag“, „hardcoding this localhost into this URL in order to make progress quickly“ – you do not want to risk carrying this into production code. Just know that keeping experimental branches open for a longer time is a bad habit, either. So think of them e.g. as „in two hours, I will either merge or delete this branch, there‘s no way about it“. There‘s nothing in there that you wouldn‘t be able to reproduce if required.
And sometimes, it‘s more effective to work from the other end. Instead of going from „very close to where we want to be“, start from a place completely unpolluted by your technical debt. Start a toy project. Use exactly the dependencies that you have in your real project, and try to set up your error scenario. In our case, this method helped us in understanding a completely meaningless NoClassDefFoundError, because suddenly – with exactly the same JDK and Grails packages that we had in the real code – IntelliJ IDE just felt more like telling us verbosely what the actual problem is. Which you can then see without all the clutter.
Even more, this procedure does help your with your own Rubber Ducking – after all, you want to describe to yourself a scenario, where „Actually I don‘t get it, I am just doing this and that and…“, well, are you? Or is there more to it that your eyes don‘t see? Just find out.
Of course, this is just the precursor to a more test driven approach. Toy projects aren‘t really anything else, they are just isolated environments in which you completely see what is going on, with an essential setup and a clear expectation. These are tests. Now if you already wrote them, why not think about including them in your projects as tests? Especially if you‘re kind of new to test driven development, you can make this habit of toy boxing a guide on the road to a more test driven way of thinking.
Or maybe, just don‘t make errors. If you ever have the option – just choose that [I guess then you have time to fix mine, too? :)]
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