News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Debugging Mindset. Parent comment

Re:The Debugging Mindset by enraged_camel on Monday April 03, 2017 @10:40AM (#14023068)
>> It's not always reliable and sometimes it's just plain wrong though.

Yep, and in my experience this can result in wasting huge amounts of time. I've lost count of the number of times I've followed my intuition down some rabbit hole, and several hours later found that the issue was something totally unrelated. This usually happens when I've been coding for a while and am tired. :)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Debugging Mindset by AnimalMuppet on Monday April 03, 2017 @01:22PM (#14024907)
Well, (well developed) intuition is on average a net win. For any given problem, it can let you down badly.

I try to do something like "follow intuition, but with a timer started". If following the intuition fails to bear fruit by the time it "should", I start to question if I'm on the right track.

[ Parent | on HN ]