Comment by ajuc

Not a solution for all of your problems, but it does help me with debugging stuff faster: I have a directory on the desktop called "scratchpad" in which every day I create a new txt file.

During the day I copy-paste every JIRA link I work on there, related class names, APIs, fragments of code I worked on that were particularly tricky, test cases, stacktraces I encountered, useful SQLs, urls to webpages with solutions to problems I had, short descriptions of these problems and my discoveries about them. It's not very verbose, usually it's less than 1 screen worth of notes per day (excluding the stacktraces ;)).

At the end of the work day I save that file as date_short_description.txt - for example 20241121_exception_when_logging.txt.

When I encounter a problem giving me dejavu - the first thing I do is grep in that folder for exceptions, lines in stacktrace, class names, related keywords, etc.

After a few years working at the same company it's surprisingly helpful. I started doing this at my first job after working there for over 2 years and experiencing the "I could swear I dealt with this problem before, but can't rememeber how".

Another tip that is probably personal is - I tend to fall into this habit of "do a very small change, compile, check tests" loop that feels good but is suboptimal if testing/compiling takes a long time. So I try to notice if I fall into that trap and stop myself. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it's wasting time (and giving me an excuse to procrastinate cause "it's compiling").