I still remember the round-eyed awe on a first-year computer science student’s face when I walked past the monitor set into his desk, scanned his screen (upside down), pointed out the error, and nudged him in the direction of the solution. He had been trying to solve the problem by making small, random changes to his program, and he was amazed at how quickly I identified what was going on. Many of the students in the class were new to programming, and still had a long way to go before they could become comfortable with it. And there I was, figuring things out just by looking at them.

It would have been easy for the new students to feel as if they could never do what I do, so I made sure to save some time during that class session for a secret I wanted to share with them. That secret was:

If I can figure out a programming problem quickly, it’s because I’ve made so many mistakes before.

The more you program, the more intimate you become with error messages. This quote is attributed to Maurice Wilkes:

As soon as we started programming, we found out to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

M. Wilkes

I like reading, trying things out, and making things up, so I’ve run into all sorts of errors. I also enjoy helping other people, so I’ve run into all sorts of other people’s errors, too. I haven’t encountered every single error yet (my printer has never been on fire). But I’ve hung out in IRC channels where people help other people troubleshoot in real-time, I’ve read countless mailing list posts in the process of troubleshooting something I’m working on, and I don’t mind rolling up my sleeves and getting my hands into the source code. In the process, I’ve learned some of the techniques for finding out where problems might lurk.

So that’s it. That’s the magic, really. Learn. Make mistakes. Figure things out. Help other people figure things out. Then, when weird problems come up, you can say, “Hmm. Hang on. Let me poke around… hmm… ah, there it is, the doohickey was kerfluzzled and a quick xyzzy fixed it.” Or something like that.

=)

See, all those hours hanging out on mailing lists, #linuxhelp, and #emacs in university are paying off…