Today I Learned

Life hacks for programmers

<TIL

Learn from your bugs

In his book Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes: “Errors are rich in information”. Every time I fix a particularly tricky or interesting bug, I take a few minutes to write down some facts about it.

Suggested entry template:

  Date:

  Symptom:

  Cause:

  How found:

  Fix:

  Fixed in file(s):

  Caused by me:

  Time taken to resolve bug:

  Lessons:
  Coding. How can I adjust my coding to avoid these problems in the future?
  Testing. What test case was missing?
  Debugging. How could I have sped up finding this bug? Did I assume too much? Do I need better logging in the code?

Keypoints:

• not a bug tracker. But especially when hunting down a difficult bug over many days, add an entry even if you didn’t cause it.
• write the entry immediately after it has been fixed. That’s when all the details are still fresh in my mind.

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