Getting stuck while building a new feature can put a wrench in your progress. When I get stuck, there are severals things I make sure to do to make sure I get unstuck and back to making progress again. If it’s an issue about what to do next, I’ll usually look at the story to see what the end result of the feature should achieve and the code that I’ve just written. From there, I will be able to know what my code is able to do and what else I need to implement.
If it’s a debugging issue and there’s an error that doesn’t seem to have a quick fix, I’ll start with some console log debugging. This involves placing console.log statements in sections of the code that I think the error may be occurring to make sure that the code is running up to that point. That will usually be enough to unblock me half the time, but I will use the debugger built into my IDE if console logging doesn’t get me the answers I want.
By placing breakpoints in the crucial spots in my code, I am able to pause the call stack and visually see the state of all the different variables in my code at any given time. From there, I am able to check and confirm that the state of my variables are what they should be at that point in time to make sure that my implementation is working as it should.
On the topic of ChatGPT, I have not used it as much as I would like to. Recently, I’ve used AI tools to help me get started with projects with the initial boilerplate. For example, ChatGPT is incredibly helping for setting up a basic Express server that I can build on top of. I’d like to use ChatGPT more in the future for more tasks, but I’m happy with how it helps me currently.
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