- How do you working through being “stuck” on a problem
My first step of working through a “new” and perhaps unexpected problem for me is to usually identify what I want the outcome to be. I’ve had several problems where I am getting the right outcome, but perhaps my test cases were not correct. So after correctly identifying what I want to happen and reviewing what is happening you can identify what is the issue: is the software failing under exceptions, bad inputs, or are my results incorrect.
After getting a grasp of the problem I like to sketch out a diagram, hand-drawn if it’s going to be simple, a more complicated miro-board if it has more moving components. From there I can identify how I expect the code to flow through the problem and then identify which ones have a higher risk of not performing as expected. I.e. Maybe some assumptions were made about the return type that were not verified. After this identification I’ll work through the items I’ve identified as most troublesome.
If that doesn’t work it could require more thorough debugging to identify what step is causing the breakdown, through print statements, or function by function or line by line debugging. If the problem is simple enough I can use a simple problem to work through.
Also wrapped all up in there is some heavy google searching where needed and some chatGPT…
- Do you use chatGPT or other AI tools? In what way?
Yes! Of course, it’s better than a google search during debugging, and really helps kick off boiler plate code for projects. Reduces the search time to figuring out setting up templates for new features. Some examples I have used it on for this project is
- multiprocessing in python
- .jinja files to report our results
- html/css to get things to look right
- figuring out error codes
And this is just for this class. It can’t help with everything and sometimes it will loop on some things. At work I was working on setting up an SqLite database with the Entity Framework in C# that it couldn’t wrap its head around getting it set up in .Net framework 4.8. But it did point out areas that were not working and did help with pointing me in the right direction.
Is it perfect? no, but its a tool that helps work through converting a vision into code syntax if you know what information is important and what is not.
- Project Related? Back to ChatGPT
Really cool to use chatGPT as it helped me navigate html and css setup that I had not delved deeply into in about a year? I liked how it helped with the front-end but found it so much better than when I started this programming and was googling and using W3Schools or Mozilla and trying to interpret the difference between different CSS styles.
Here is where we stand!
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