Comfort with Small Mistakes

It has been a long time since I learned how to program, and it is easy to forget some of the hard-won lessons in the beginning. Easy until I try to teach people to program. There is a lot of accidental and inherent complexity in programming, but I am ready for that: I remember to explain how carefully to follow the syntax, and the kind of syntactical gotchas that are easy to fail.

But there is one metalesson that is much easier to forget, and much harder to learn, and to teach. Humans are used to small mistakes having reasonably small consequences. But even in cases with catatrophic consequences, the consequences look related to the mistakes.

However, in programming, small mistakes can lead not just to big consequences, but to weird consequences. A missing comma might mean that things work fine in the testing environment, but in production, every third request gets a slightly wrong result.

This really stumps people. They copy code somewhat imperfectly from the board, or make a small mistake when they edit it to change from "Hello world" to "Goodbye world", and suddenly, a completely unrelated part of the program starts going haywire.

This happens to old hands too. The number of times I have edited code and ran the tests, only to discover a clearly unrelated test failing, is not small. The difference that comes with experience is that I take a deep breath, think "I've got this", and start down the troubleshooting path.

The troubleshooting can include any number of things: I might go in with a debugger, add print statements, do a bisect-diff to figure out what caused the problem, try random things to see what happens, or just trace the execution path carefully.

The troubleshooting process does not matter as much as what comes before it: the deep breath. This is my time to accept the problem has happened, and that I am in for a process which can take two hours, and at the end of which my entire productivity will be "added missing semicolon". Sometimes a breath is not enough, and I need to get up and get some tea. But the most important, and almost invisible step, at the beginning is to step back, remember that this is, weirdly, part of the job, and to become comfortable doing it.

If you want to be any kind of software developer, accept it now. Much of your life will be seeing weird consequences, and tracing it back to a small mistake. Eventually, like everyone, you will succeed. Flush with victory, make a note of your success somewhere: anywhere where the overhead of writing it is low, be it an e-mail to yourself or a note-keeping app.

If you ever decide to teach, or write a blog, this is an unending source of content.

(Thanks to Veronica Hanus for her feedback on an early draft. All issues and mistakes that remain are my responsibility.)