The frustration in error messages

The frustration in error messages

Have you ever made a mistake which resulted in you having to listen to someone nag about the mistake so much that you wish the day would end? There are lots of information concerning conflict resolution and how complaints shouldn't last longer than a minute for it to be called constructive criticism or impactful.

Sadly machines aren't adept in the skill of conflict resolution which is why developers don't enjoy negative feedback from the machine. Usually when developers write code, we make some mistakes (a lot of mistakes) and when we try to run our code the machine takes its time to dissect what we have written. If the machine perfectly understand what you wrote then the code builds, if it doesn't then you're in for a lengthy message outlining what you did wrong.

Reading error messages is like visiting the hospital; nobody wants to do it, but when the situation warrants we have to do it. The issue with error messages is that they're not concise. If you break one little thing the machine will give you a very long message that can be quite difficult to sort through. The messages are sometimes insightful in solving the problem, at other times we developer copy the error message and paste on Google in order get the feedback of other developers who got that error message and what they did about it.

Avoiding error messages because they're annoying isn't the best way to go as junior, yes they're annoying, yes they suck. However, in the long run you need to learn to be able to stand the sight of those complex report. Most times, the most important part of the error report is in the first few lines, pick the first ten lines and ignore the rest.

Copying error report and searching on the internet is sometimes helpful, at other times it's like looking up your ailment online (it doesn't end well). You have to remember that all the advice you can find on the internet is based off of a project and there are times your project is different from the project that they're dishing advices from. Your error messages in your text editor or IDE however are specific to your project and can help you grow your skill a lot faster if you can understand them.