Comment by closeparen

A thousand times this. The better I get at debugging, the less inclined I am to guess and check. It’s almost always worthwhile to learn or write a tool that will show you what is actually happening. This can feel like getting sidetracked, but it isn’t. The answer almost always becomes clear.

I have seen a case where so many people wanted to go and see part of a company’s operation that it started putting on a traveling stage production of itself, setting up in an HQ conference room every few months. I joined early enough to see it in situ and found that the touring version was nothing like the real thing.