Had a guy in a Discord server teach me more in 10 minutes than a 12 week bootcamp did

I was stuck on a Python loop problem for 3 days straight. Some random user named 'debug_dave' jumped into the help channel and asked me to share my screen. He walked me through how I was accidentally resetting my variable inside the loop, which I had done 6 times without noticing. He didn't just give me the answer, he made me explain each line out loud. That small interaction totally changed how I debug stuff now. Has anyone else had a stranger online fix a coding block that fast?

2 comments

2 Comments

roberts.diana23d ago

Oh man, I reset a variable inside a loop so many times I should have named it 'Groundhog Day'. There was this one time I spent like four hours trying to figure out why my counter was always zero, and some guy in a Python help server just typed "you're setting it to 0 at the start of each iteration" and my brain went numb. It's humbling when a stranger sees your dumb mistake in ten seconds flat. Now I make a point to talk through my code out loud to myself before I even ask for help, but I still miss stuff constantly.

riley5823d ago

Man that's the real kicker right there. Do you think verbalizing your code like that actually rewires your brain, or is it more about just slowing down enough to catch your own stupid mistakes?