Comment by Zolomon
18 days ago
I have been bitten more than once thinking that my initial assumption was correct, diving deeper and deeper - only to realize I had to ascend and look outside of the rabbit hole to find the actual issue.
> Assumption is the mother of all screwups.
This is how I view debugging, aligning my mental model with how the system actually works. Assumptions are bugs in the mental model. The problem is conflating what is knowledge with what is an assumption.
I've once heard from an RTS game caster (IIRC it was Day9 about Starcraft) "Assuming... Is killing you".
When playing Captain Obvious (i.e. the human rubber duck) with other devs, every time they state something to be true my response is, "prove it!" It's amazing how quickly you find bugs when somebody else is making you question your assumptions.