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Now, I've got some final tips for debugging,

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and these are not so much techniques, but there are just really,

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really important tips from somebody who's done quite a lot of coding and created

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a massive amount of bugs in my lifetime.

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So tip number 7 is take a break. It's really,

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really important when you're just staring at the code and you keep looking at

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it, it's not going to tell you the solution.

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Just have a cup of tea or have a nap,

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or just go to sleep and try to tackle it tomorrow.

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You will be surprised just how much easier things are when your brains had some

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downtime and then you come back to it. Everything seems so much more obvious.

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And if you really, really get stuck and you just can't see it, ask a friend,

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not your friend print, but your actual friend,

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a real human. Preferably a developer, but they don't have to be.

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It could be somebody who's taking the course with you.

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You could go onto discord and find other students to help you because after all,

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you're all just leveling up your own programming skills

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right? The really good thing about asking a friend to look through your code is

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they won't make the same assumptions that you've made.

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So they have some fresh eyes that they can look at the code with,

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and it might be incredibly obvious what's actually happening.

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And it's really not embarrassing at all.

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If somebody managed to help you with your code,

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you can offer to help them the next time when they get stuck. And for the person

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who's helping you,

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they're also just working out their programming muscles, right? Now

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the next tip is to run often. No,

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you don't have to go exercising to be a good programmer.

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But what I mean is run your code often.

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Don't wait until you've written loads and loads of code to hit run

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and then find out you've got loads of snags and loads of bugs.

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But run it after every little execution.

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Once you feel like you've changed the program ever so slightly, run it. Confirm

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that it's actually doing what you want it to do,

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because if you leave it all to the end,

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then you end up with a pile of bugs and you don't know where to start. Now,

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if you do end up in that situation and you can see multiple bugs at the same

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time, try to tackle them one at a time

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instead of trying to do bits and bobs of each. It will really, really help.

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And the final tip is, of course, Stack Overflow. I've saved this the last

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because you really don't want to take every single small bug of yours to Stack

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Overflow, that's not what it's designed for. Instead,

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it's really designed as a way of asking other developers

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when you think that you've come across a bug or an issue that should be unique.

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Now, if you think that you issue isn't unique and other people should have

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encountered this, then just search Stack Overflow.

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If you really think that nobody in the world has had this issue that you are

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having right now, then that's the moment to ask the oracle, I mean Stack

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Overflow.

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I've worked in a lot of companies where everybody just goes to the part when

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Stack Overflow is down, because there's just no point. As programmers

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we use it and we search it so much and it's become a really vital tool in the tool

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belt.

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But you only wanna ask a question when you've pretty sure that you've exhausted

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all other avenues of debugging and you've searched all of Stack Overflow and you

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finally end up with something very strange and very weird that you want others

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to help you figure out. So don't worry about creating bugs.

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And hopefully at this point, you're creating friendly bugs,

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like this little Caterpillar right now.

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And as you scale up and become even more advanced,

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you're going to be creating bigger and more scary bugs.

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So at some point in the future, when you're creating bugs like these,

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then you really know that you've become a professional.

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You will wish to come back to today when you can tackle bugs like these 

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instead. So don't worry about

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about creating them. It doesn't mean that you are bad programmer. In fact,

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it's an important part of every programmer's journey. Just as a sort of personal

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note,

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there was a point in time where I've really thought that I was not a programmer of

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code, that I was just a programmer of bugs.

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It seemed like every line of code I wrote was a bug.

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So these are my 10 top tips for debugging.

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And I hope that any time when your code is not doing what you expect it to do to

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come back to this lesson, review these 10 steps, go through them one by one

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and I bet 99% of the time, once you've gone through all of these stages,

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you will have solved your bug and you will have made your code a lot better.

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And remember that every bug that you catch in your code and that you fix is like

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lifting a dumbbell in the gym. It's just one rep.

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And the more reps you do the better you'll get at programing. In the next

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lesson, I've got some coding challenges for you to debug.

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Are you ready to flex your programming muscles?

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I hope so. Head over to the next lesson and get started.