First of all, I just want to start off by thanking the organizer.
They really put in a lot of effort
to make me feel really special as a speaker.
Also as an attendee, watching these other talks
so I just want to give them a huge thanks
Can I get an extra round of applaud for the organizers
And also, thanks everyone for being here.
So, I'm Blithe
You can find me @blithe on Twitter and Github
I work for a company call Big Nerd Ranch
It's based in Atlanta and
some people know it. Alright!
It's based in Atlanta and I work remotely full time in Oakland
We do a couple of things at Big Nerd Ranch
We develop apps, we write books and we also teach courses.
And of course, we're hiring good people, always.
As you heard, I used to be a scientist
I have a PhD in Physical Chemistry
And a lot of people ask me what is physical chemistry?
what does that mean?
Well, if you think about it It's right on the border between
what you know as physics and what you know as chemistry
That means I spent a long time in grad school
It also means I've done a lot of experiments
A lot of people asked me "How did you do it?
How did you make it through 6 years of grad school
make it to the end?"
And I did it by using the scientific method
and I'm still using it everyday
I'm a developer, but I'm still using the scientific method everyday
How many of you have gotten an error
Google it
pull the first answer straight from StackOverflow
and put it in your code and run it
I think we all tried it
And did it solve your problem?
Maybe
Maybe it did. Maybe if you were lucky
But probably not
Most of the time, probably not
and it was pretty inefficient
and the more important question is
Did you learn anything from that?
The most important part of troubleshooting is learning
If you solved a problem without learning from it,
It's only a temporary fix
It's either going to come back later or you're going to make the same mistake in the future
Learning is how you level up as a developer
by learning from your experiences
And that bring me back to the scientific method
How can using the scientific method help you level up as a developer?
Well, What is it?
Well, if you Google it and go straight to Wikipedia you'll see this definition
It's a set of techniques for acquiring knowledge
And I love this definition because it can apply to anything
any career, including being a developer
The scientific method, it's methodical
It's an established procedure and scientists have been using it since the 17th century
It's also systematic
It's a step-by-step process
and it's for gaining knowledge and incorporating that into your process
and the time for reflection is built right into the scientific method
The other day, a coworker of mine popped up in the company chat room and said
"Has anyone seen Ruby string interpolation fail?"
and I thought that's a pretty interesting question
Why do you ask? Why are you asking that?
So we dug a little deeper and they were using factory girl sequencing method
to create a series of users with unique email addresses.
So email 1, email 2, email 3...
and it wasn't working. It was failing.
It was trying to create users with the same email address
and it was failing and they couldn't figure out why
and their solution,
they ended up just rolling their own sequencing method
Well, that may have solved their problem temporarily,
that wasn't really the most elegant solution
and it turned out,
the real problem was that they were missing the hash symbol
that was required for interpolation
so simple mistakes, but we all make simple mistakes like that
We all make them all the times
But maybe using the scientific method would have helped in this case
The first step of the scientific method is defining the problem
As a scientist, this means saying what is the information that you're trying to gain?
What knowledge are you trying to gain or learn?
What's important to keep in mind when you're defining the problem is
forget what you think you know and question everything
Just think about open up your mind, question everything and just define the problem
It's also important to get rid of your emotions at this point
You want to, maybe you're on a tight deadline maybe you think you know what the answer is
I'm just going to go do this. I already know what's wrong blah blah blah
Get rid of all that and just define the problem
You can do that by answering a few questions
What is behavior that you're expecting to happen?
What's actually happening?
and how are those two things different?
and how will you know when you solved your problem?
What is your criteria for success?
This is particularly important when
when other people come and ask you to help them troubleshoot
Don't listen to their assumptions.
Get rid of that out of the way.
and just start from scratch and answer these simple questions
What do you want to happen? What's actually happening?
How will you know when you fixed the problem?
Once you defined your problem,
you can start by doing some background research
and in reality, you guys are already doing this.
Everyone's doing it.
In grad school, we would just be constantly reading
Before we would ever start an experiment,
we would just be reading for days and days and days
Reading recent articles
or sometimes really old article that we would have to go to the library and dig up
We were just constantly reading
And the reason is because you want to have enough background information
So that you know you're starting with the right experiment
As a scientist, it's really expensive both
It cost a lot of time and money to do an experiment
So you want to make sure you're starting with the right experiment
and you do that by making sure you have enough background information
As a developer, you can do that by knowing your environment
So you need to know the language that you're working in
and you can always become a little more familiar with it
go dig in that dark area that you're unfamiliar with
or how does this work? What's going on here?
When you're working on a specific application,
you can look at what are the dependencies that you're using
Get to know those and even which version of those dependency are you using
For the case of the factory girl sequencing,
probably just taking a look at the documentation might have helped
Oh, I'm missing the hash symbol. That's it.
You also want to be reading the literature
You want to stay up to date with blog post
Always be reading what's coming out, what's new
There's always a lot of content out there, so you want to be reading it
For your specific dependency,
you can look at the README
or the changelog for the most recent version
What changed, what's different
You can also look at the specific source code of the version you're using
Either on GitHub or using bundle open and the gem name
You can pull it right up, right on your computer
And dig around in there. Look at what's going on.
And also a helpful thing is to look at the test suite
of this dependency that you're looking at
Sometimes that helps you tell the expect behavior of the gem
What's suppose to be happening
Another helpful source of background information is just discussion
with your friends and colleagues
Maybe they have already encounter your problem
and they know the perfect solution
The best first experiment for you to start with
That's really hellpful
Particularly, when you're struggling on a problem
maybe you been working on it for a long time
and you're not getting anywhere
it's time to get up and go ask somebody for help
Have you seen anything like this?
And that's exactly what my colleague did
They popped in the company chatroom
"Hey, I need some help on this"
We have a rule at Big Nerd Ranch
If you're working on something for more than an hour
and you're not making progress
Don't!
It's time to stop and go ask somebody for help
It's better to get help from other people
And of course, sometime the good old rubber duck is a good helpful solution
Maybe the rubber duck doesn't talk back,
but just by explaining your problem
and how you got there is a good way to get ideas
You also want to make sure you can replicate the problem that you're having
Make it fail.
I mean can you even reproduce it? Is it an error you can reproduce?
And what are the steps that it takes to do that
Once you have that information,
you can go ahead and write an automated test
to help you solve that problem
After you gather a lot of background information,
you can then establish a hypothesis
A hypothesis needs to be educated and based in evidence
So this goes back to all the research that you've been doing
And it also need to be something that you can test
So this goes back to defining your problem
and your criteria for success
So once you have a hypothesis,
then you can start to design an experiment
And the most important part of an experiment design
is that it test your hypothesis, of course.
Don't do an experiment that doesn't test your hypothesis
Couple of tips for designing an experiment
One good thing to start with is just dividing and conquering your code base
Well first of all, hopefully you've written an automated test
So you can just run that test over and over again
to focus on the condition that you're working on
So that isolate a lot other behavior that you don't need to test immediately right now
Of course, you can always comment out big chunks of codes
If you're like "I know this stuff is working.
Let me kind of comment it out
and just run the part of the code that I need to look at right now."
Breakpoints are excellent helpful way to do it
Say your code has to go through 10 steps
and only the last one isn't working
Go ahead and enter a breakpoint
or a binding .pry right in there
You can stop and just look at the code is broken, that is not working
You can also
Say you suspect there's a problem with the dependency or a gem
What you can do is maybe create a new app
and only use that one dependency or API
Are you still having the problem?
OK, well maybe you just got rid of all of the other code that you have written
and you know it just with that
you can replicate it in a fresh app
That's another way you can isolate the code
Another important thing is to limit the variables
that you're testing
When you look at beginner troubleshoot sometimes
They try to change many variables at once
Maybe it's a problem with the controller over here
and the view or maybe it's in the model. I don't know.
and sometimes they get down a road that's really hard to come back from
and they can't even answer the question "what has changed?"
So you really don't want to do that
You want to limit your experiment to one variable at a time.
Let's test one variable
and finish our experiment before we start another one
so that we know
and we need to make sure we do the analysis part of the experiment
Don't be afraid to try something weird
Sometimes, you know you think, you're thinking
"Ah this never gonna work but I'll try it anyway."
And you try it and you find your solution
Don't be afraid to do that. Try something strange.
You can also try maybe
try something that you know is going to break your program
Go throw some gibberish in there. Type it in there.
And you know it's going to break it.
You know it's going to fail.
What happen when you run your program and it doesn't fail?
Maybe that code was never even getting run
Maybe you're not including that file or something
So try something strange
A friend of mine told me a story the other day
about how they've created a table
anytime they were trying to do a join with that table,
it was throwing some obscure error and they couldn't figure it out
What's wrong with this one table? What's wrong with it?
So they ended up, they just
they got rid of the table
They created a new one and they named it Bananas.
Just something weird.
Like just do it weird.
And that actually fixed their problem.
So Bananas worked.
And they're just like "What? What is going on?
Why? Why did that work"
and it turned out they had named their original table attributes
So of course that's a protected name so it didn't work
So trying something weird,
naming the table Bananas, that worked for them.
How many of you have ever done something like this?
Where you dig, you super deep dive. Yeah.
You're like oh it's way down here.
There's some weird problem.
And it ends up being just right on the surface.
Something simple.
When you're designing your experiment,
you want to focus on
Think about the hierarchy of blame.
Think about OK,
what is the most likely candidate for this problem?
Once you eliminated the most likely candidates,
then you can go on to the harder problems
For example,
more recently changed code
is probably more likely to be at fault
than codes that's been in production for a long time
and something that you wrote
is probably more likely to be the problem than say,
something in Ruby
But through your experiments go ahead and eliminate the most likely candidate
and then work your way down
Don't start by trying to figure out what's wrong with Ruby
After you designed your experiment,
go ahead and carry it out
and you're going to start gathering your data
that you're going to use for your analysis
So you need to think about OK,
what's the current status of your program now?
What's happening now?
Were there any changes?
Are there any new messages?
Are there any new results from your experiment?
What else changed recently?
Were there any other things that you changed?
What does the log file say?
Gather all that information
And this one may seem obvious
but it need to be said even for senior developers
Read the error message!
Just read it.
Read it out loud.
Even that alone will help it.
Just read it.
Take a look at the stack trace.
Look at the line number.
What's going on?
That's very useful information for a reason
So gather that information
as part of your experiment.
Once you have all your data,
you can start doing your analysis
and you really don't want to skip this part
This is the most important part
because this where the learning happens
This is where you level up as a developer
and it's built right into the scientific method
So now that you've done your experiment
Did it solve your problem?
That test that you wrote, is it passing now?
and what about all the rest of your test suite?
Make sure it's also passing
Make sure you solved your problem without breaking something else
And make sure you met all your criteria for success
And you also want to think about
what did you learn from that experiment?
What information can you get from that?
Don't just move on to the next thing and say
"OK, it's fixed now. Let's go"
And take a moment,
Take the time to reflect on your experiment.
What went well? What didn't go well?
Think about that
And most importantly,
you need to understand
why you solved your problem
Have you ever said,
"Well, I don't why it works, but it works."
I have news for you. You didn't fix it.
You didn't solve your problem.
It's the understanding
that cement the knowledge in your brain.
That's what make you a better developer.
And for those of you in leadership positions,
maybe you're teaching a newer developer
It's important that you make sure that they understand the why
So make them explain it to you,
Why did this change solved your problem?
Your results from your experiment
will also help you determine
what's going to happen in your next experiment.
Maybe you solved your problem already
and you don't have to do another experiment
but it will influence your experiment in the future
Maybe now you know a better first experiment to start with
"I know.
I know the fix. I'll start with this next time."
Or if you didn't solve your problem,
maybe you have a new error message
"Ok, you can work with that.
Now what's the new experiment?"
Or "Oh maybe it's a problem with this gem.
I should do more background research on that"
Another important part of the analysis
is embracing your successes.
This is really important.
A lot of people they just,
they sort of skip over this part
and go back to work
But it's really important.
If you did solve your problem,
let that sink in
because that's going to drive you
for future troubleshooting problems
You need to remember all those problems
that you solved before
and know that you can do it
and that you can keep going
And even if you didn't solved your problem this time
and you're still working on it
maybe you got a new error message.
That's progress and that's something to be celebrated
Another important part of being a scientist
is keeping a good lab notebook
and the reason you do this is because
it tells the story of your experiences
either to you in the future when you're going back to look at it
or to somebody else
maybe another developer in the future
So this is the picture of one of my lab notebook from grad school.
I probably filled about 10 of these and they're like 300 pages each
So I did a lot of documenting in grad school.
The reason I included this is just to say
" it's OK to have a paper lab notebook and write the things that you're doing
That's OK. Digital work also."
And the reason you keep a lab notebook is because
you're just not going to remember it
you're not going to remember
As a grad student,
we probably did about 20 to 30 experiments a day
each just changing one variable at a time.
And there's just no way we would've remember
all of the things that we tried
And think about how many experiments you do as a developer each day
when you're troubleshooting
And maybe you think
"OK, well I'm already just recording all this stuff in the log.
It's all saved over there.
I can always go back and look
But that's not an sufficient lab notebook
Too much information can be just as bad as too little information
So it's up to you
to glean the meaning from these experiment that you're doing
and record that
One of the best first step for keeping a good lab notebook
is writing a good commit message
It's all fresh in your brain
and so you can maybe you solve the problem
so you can commit that change and push it
So write some explanation in that
that commit message and let people know what's going on
and people will see this in the future
Either you'll come back and look at it
or maybe another developer who's working in the codebase will come back and look
Additionally , if you added test for the scenario that you're working on,
that's also a good documentation for what's going on.
"OK, this was the the problem.
We added a test for it now."
Also, right after you solve a problem,
you want to update the documentation.
Is it missing anything?
Did you have that error because
the documentation wasn't good enough?
So go ahead and go update the README.
Or maybe you were missing some environment variable
Go ahead and set up an example environment variable file
so people know "Hey, you need this thing."
to save them that time
So that's all part of good documentation.
so keep that
Set that up for other people.
You can also contribute to open source.
So say you find a problem in someone else software or gem,
go ahead and let them know
So open up an issue on Github if it doesn't already exist.
Let them know the step that it takes to recreate this problem.
If you were able to write a test for it,
go ahead and submit a pull request with that test
Sometimes that's helpful even if you don't know how to solve the problem.
That's helpful for maintainers to say
"Oh, this is the test that's failing."
And of course,
if you do know how how to solve the problem,
go ahead and submit a pull request for that
You just got some open source contribution
and that's awesome
You can also write about your experiences
Have you ever written something up and then
later down the road and you're like googling for that same problem
and you come back and you find your own blog post?
Yes. Yes.
And you're like "Man, thank you so much old me.
That was really helpful.
Thank you for writing that down."
So think about all those other people out there
that are getting the same reaction when they find your blog post
and they're like "Man, that was really helpful blog post.
Thank you for writing that down."
So if you're not doing this already, you should be doing this
Anyone can start a blog.
If you don't already have one, go start it.
You can also write failed experiment.
Don't be afraid to do that.
In grad school, we always joked about starting a journal of failed experiments
That way we would publish a million papers that way
Like well, these are the million things we tried and they didn't work
But that's OK. If you...
Sometimes that's also helpful
and maybe somebody comes along and read this and can help you
and say "Hey,
you might try doing it this way.
That might solve your problem."
The most important part
about keeping a lab notebook is sharing the the knowledge
In academia, it's all about
gaining knowledge and then sharing that knowledge
either through publication or through teaching
and I think developers can really learn a lot from that
So as you're doing these experiments,
go ahead and share that information
Maybe tweet about it
or blog about it, like I said
or you can even come and present a talk at a conference like this
"Hey, here's this weird thing that I figured out.
Let me tell you about it."
So that's really the most important part
is sharing that knowledge with other people
and teaching it to other people
And so I'm really looking forward to seeing all of your lab notebooks online.
Thanks very much