by Steve Wright
When you have as much support as we do with Flatiron School, it’s easy to rely on asking a question in the Learn.co platform, to reach out to your Technical Coach, or reach out to your cohort in Slack, but there are few things more satisfying than debugging your code with a solo approach.
For me, it was all about the confidence I could figure it out, and the patience to get there. I’ve heard instructors say “engineers live in the land of failing, so get comfortable with it.” While this is a great line, and very true, no words can match the feeling of being comfortable in chaos to use a binding.pry on every route in your controller until you find the problem, or to run shotgun to play with your application in a live browser until you realize which view (or controller) is not displaying or connecting properly.
As I mentioned, this takes patience as well. To me, patience is a choice to be better than you are currently. If you give in too early to ask for help, you’re limiting your growth as a developer, and a student in general. Reading spec failures can be scary, but they will give you plenty of hints on where to go, whether your error is related to syntax, method/variable, route, etc.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t get feedback from others; so much of coding is working with other developers, but I do think it’s critical for learning to make sure you’re not giving into support within 5-10 minutes of overlooking your spec errors.
I know it’s all easier said than done, but keep practicing to build confidence, choose to be patient, and realize that plenty of others are living in the land of the failing just like you.