DEV Community: Filips Masolovs

Debugging a problem

Filips Masolovs — Mon, 11 May 2020 18:13:52 +0000

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

Edsger Dijkstra

I like this quote! Whenever I am asked something like: "How did this bug appear?" my first response would usually be: "Someone just put it there..."
And then we can check!?

However, being in this whole new world for less then a year debugging is currently the hardest part for me! Sometimes you open the console and the error is blunt and obvious like "Cannot read property 'smth...' of undefined" most of the times this type of issue will be pretty easy. Obviously there can be times when you struggle to realize why on earth the object or whatever is undefined, but still, probably this is workable!
Then there are hard errors like object doesn’t support property, Uncaught RangeError, ...is not a function and such! These usually take much more time for me to debug and I definitely need to learn to use debugger in such cases more properly, but about this more in the future!

But then there is hell. And by hell I mean when all the code is loaded, there are no errors in the console, you see what you want to see in the DOM, but... but the functionality isn't working! This is extremely tedious when you know for sure that it was working before.
And this is the type of "bug" that frustrates me the most for now!
When I encounter bugs I usually at the least know where to check, but in cases like this, it is from a to z... So what to do? Dig?

What are your stories with debugging and bugs in general?
Care to share?

P.S. I would like to write an article about my thoughts on design docs next! Would you be interested in reading it?

Working remotely! YES or NO?

Filips Masolovs — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 15:56:22 +0000

So, today I decided to ponder about working remotely!
Its' pros and cons, whether I really like it or no and is it even productive.

First of all, I noticed that on the days when I visit the office I am so drained out by the end of the day that I don't want to do anything anymore. This is related to a 2h daily commute that I need to tackle in order to get to the office and to the fact that working in the office quite honestly just takes more out of you due to always chatting with someone, joggling this and that and quite simple more things to do then just tasks at hand.
When I work at home I can easily do some extra work at 8PM, 9PM sometimes even 10PM. No problem. I am not tired from driving for 2h and working at home is quite simple more calming.

Secondly, I have to say(even though this is very specific from person to person) that my personal productivity level is better at home. And here I mean not the hours spent on work, no-no, I mean the overall amount of work done within a day! Obviously if you lack focus and can't sit for a while at a computer thinking about how to solve an unsolvable problem, maybe, this is not the way for you!

To conclude, I would like to say, that I really like working remotely!
My productivity is better. I can work more. I am not tired by the end of the day.

Did you try working remotely? Maybe with a friend?
How did it go? And if you haven't, why?

Tell me about your experience...

The start of my journey!

Filips Masolovs — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 11:58:23 +0000

01.08.2019
That was the day when my "development" journey started!
I will clarify immediately that the only reason why I put "development" in quotation marks is because I still consider myself far from a decent developer.

Being a frontend-dev my journey started with HTML, it was easy. I mean with HTML you don't need to think a lot of super complicated logic. What you see is what you get, so yeah those steps were easy.
After that came CSS, I can't say that it is particularly hard, but some CSS stuff is confusing and misleading. Like I still sometimes wonder: "Do I justify or align here?" when working with flex-box. And some things like gradient transition require hacks to work, but these are very easily available on the web.

But then came the hard part, JS, React.JS...
Here's where things get tricky, here you have to implement logic, use functions and battle Sauron not to get any errors in your console.
For the most part I manage to write the most part of code when I am creating something from scratch and get stuck only at the end and here and there need some refactoring to be done, but the biggest issue for me comes when I battle some already prewritten code. This is where I get stuck.

But I guess the journey doesn't supposed to be easy? Does it? I mean if it would, what would be the point? So yes, even if I do struggle now on things that may not be so hard, I still see how much I have grown personally in the last few months and I still feel that I can grow further in this industry...

TTYS, Mr.Masolov