There is no programmer in the world who has not come across errors in their code. You might’ve come across this quote, “90% of coding is debugging, the other 10% is writing bugs” it’s funny but in most of the cases its true. Someone who is new to the programming world will surely face problems and errors or might’ve started learning a new technology or is stuck with a problem and helping them solve such problems is being useful and it also improves your programming skills. If you yourself are in the learning phase and are at a beginner/intermediate level it’s going to be quite useful and a skill you must know, it’ll surely help you in the long run.
We always try to learn and gain as much knowledge as we can. In the same way helping a colleague or friend stuck with a problem or error in return will help you to learn something, find a new solution or a workaround for a certain problem. Even if you don’t know the language, technology or the framework you’ll probably end up learning something related to it. As a beginner you too will face errors and discussing it with someone will help you understand what your code is doing and it’ll also reinforce what you learned.
What are the Benefits?
- You’ll learn to grasp quickly what issue or problem there is or the underlying functionality of the code.
- Improve communication skills and technical knowledge.
- Learn to come up with workarounds for problems.
- Learn where to search or look for when facing a problem, reading the related documentation and its specifics.
- Helps you become a better code reviewer in a way.
How to Help others?
There are dozens of ways to help others. Reach out to your friends and inform them to let you know when they are stuck with an error/problem. Stack Overflow is a great place to help and get solutions for similar problem, there will be many solutions to a certain problem but maybe yours is a better one or the required solution the person was looking for. Contributing to open-source projects and solving some of their issues or finding a bug and fixing it.
Conclusion
Helping a fellow programmer is not a waste of your time or you should never hesitate to help. Take up the challenge, try to understand what they need or what functionality that piece of code is for, research and come up with solutions. You’ll be helpful and useful for someone as well as learn something new 😊
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