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Tactic to get unstuck: Go for a walk

You just had a bug assigned to you.

You read the description, and the steps to reproduce it. You followed them, and yup, there it is. Something that wasn’t supposed to happen.

So you dove into the code. Everything looks good. You attached debuggers and inspected data. Everything checked out. What is going on?

At some point you aren’t learning more about what is happening - you’re stuck.

What’s helped me is really hard to do sometimes. It’s hard to remember to do it, it’s hard to pull myself out of investigation-mode to do it.

Go for a walk. Around 20 minutes. Just walk outside, keep going for about 10 minutes, then head back.

More times than not, the solution pops into my head. It’s not a technical skill, but it is effective. Try it sometime!

- Karl

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