Debugging is whole other skill set, one which I don’t have yet!
Yesterday, I spent about 45 minutes in a conference call with my Bloc mentor, trying to figure out why my RSpec tests weren’t passing. After a few attempts at “puts”ing things, deleting things, and putting things back, my mentor finally figured out that the cause of my woes was...a blank space ! O_O My code was literally vomiting on itself because of a blank space. Or, to put it in more eloquent, technical terms, Ruby was parsing the extra blank line as part of the array. When it “found” the blank array, naturally the blank array failed the test.
So why am I blabbing on and on about this? Because it was a learning experience for me. There were many times during that 45 minute meeting where I had to suppress the urge to scream, shout, give up, and turn off the computer. It’s easy to be frustrated when you don’t know anything. LOL. But thanks to my mentor’s patience and unwillingness to give up, I not only learned something about Ruby, I also learned that while it’s easy to get frustrated, you don’t have to succumb to those frustrated feelings.
I’m going to go back to debugging more code. Gotta flex those debugging muscles!