Dealing with Bugs as a Novice Frontend Developer

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. - Edsger Dijkstra

That is just a funny quote I grabbed from here

A bug is simply an error that is making a computer program misbehave.

Learning frontend development can be quite fun (when your code is working the exact way you want) but often times, it just doesn't work that way. You are bound to face bugs at some point in your learning journey. Even Senior Developers encounter bugs so who are you😂.

As a newbie, bugs can frustrate you to the extent that you might just want to quit coding but the point is that is how you will learn.

So here are a few things you can do when you face bugs

1. Use Google - All programmers actually use google. If you are getting an error message of some kind, you can just copy the error message and paste it on google. There is a 100% chance that someone has faced the same problem you are facing and another person has provided the solution to the problem. The trick is that using google can be overwhelming because you get a lot of search results.So as a frontend developer, when you use google to debug, there are some likely websites you can get your solutions from

   • stackoverflow.com
   • w3schools.com
   • developer.mozilla.org (MDN)
   • dev.to
   • medium.com etc

2. Ask a senior colleague - This is probably the fastest way to fix a bug because you are asking a real person that has probably faced the same issue you are facing. Although, this can be a little difficult because most people self-learn. A quick fix to this would be to join coding communities so you can learn with other developers. Examples of some coding communities you can join include:

   • stack overflow,
   • women who code,
   • freecodecamp,
   • hashnode etc.

Thanks for reading. I wish you the best in your learning journey. Kindly let me know your thoughts in the comments section. You can also subscribe to my posts if this actually helped you.

Comments

[Chiamaka Ojiyi]

Very valid debugging tips and these tips are useful to both frontend and backend devs, no matter where you are in your learning journey. Great post, David!

[akinloludavid]

Thank you so much Chiamaka