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Find and Fix Bugs Like a Pro With Divide and Conquer
If I could learn only one thing about debugging, I’d learn to divide and conquer
Divide and Conquer
Divide and conquer is an algorithm design type. It works by recursively breaking a problem in two (or more) smaller problems of a similar nature. If you can solve the little issue, you can solve a bigger one too. Divide and conquer is used primarily for sorting or finding the closest pair of points.
But divide and conquer is more than that. It’s a mindset you can use to debug your apps.
Debugging
Debugging is a tiring task for many developers. You need to know your intended inputs and outputs. You need to understand the code and the flow of the app. Often finding a mistake is much harder than fixing it.
Countless programmers hate debugging for another reason. We prefer making things than fixing them. It’s a lot more satisfying to create new code than to spend half a day seeking an error and finally changing two lines.
The naive approach to finding bugs is going through the code line by line, logging data, or setting breakpoints. You can use that in trivial apps or if you know almost exactly where the mistake is.
