How to Solve All Your Problems Without Really Knowing What You're Doing
summary
Company builds a mobile insurance app with a Rails backend and a React Native front end; a policy start-date screen has two radio options, “today” and “choose a future date,” and the bug is that choosing a future date then switching back still saves the old date. Problem-solving follows four steps: understand the bug, map code with git search and PR history, write a failing test, then set state to today in the radio-change handler, run tests, and check for side effects and better architectural fixes.
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chapters (36)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:40Who Should Care
- 1:58Steps to Problem Solving
- 2:43Sinus Infection
- 3:53Imposter Syndrome
- 5:57Where to Start
- 7:16Finding Examples
- 8:45Map Things Out
- 9:33Ask Questions
- 12:23Debugging
- 13:46Example Problem
- 19:14Plan a Solution
- 19:29How well this features tested
- 20:02The simplest solution
- 20:55Can you hold that
- 21:13Pseudocode
- 22:01Solution
- 23:26Unexpected Side Effects
- 23:52Checking the Solution
- 24:48Ask Yourself
- 25:06Have Time
- 25:39Adding Comments
- 26:26Does it make sense
- 26:59I had a momentary lapse in judgment
- 29:19Is this solution reasonable
- 30:27Can we solve it another way
- 34:35Onboarding Engineers
- 35:25Teaching People to Answer Their Own Questions
- 36:43Discussion
- 38:09Internal Struggle
- 39:03PR Feedback
- 40:54UI
- 42:01Writing more code
- 43:31Mapping out code
- 44:14Is this really a problem
- 46:40Finding relevant files
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