Comment by jwpapi
6 days ago
I’m not sure that doesn’t sit well with me.
Rule 1 should be: Reproduce with most minimal setup.
99% you’ll already have found the bug.
1% for me was a font that couldn’t do a combination of letters in a row. life ft, just didn’t work and thats why it made mistakes in the PDF.
No way I could’ve ever known that if I wouldn’t have reproduced it down to the letter.
Just split code in half till you find what’s the exact part that goes wrong.
Related: decrease your iterating time as much as possible. If you can test your fix in 30 seconds vs 5 minutes, you’ll fix it in hours instead of days.
Rule 4 is divide and conquer, which is the 'splitting code in half' you reference.
I'd argue that you can't effectively split something in half unless you first understand the system.
The book itself really is wonderful - the author is quite approachable and anything but dogmatic.