[seanp2k2]

I've been writing a comment as a placeholder for real code stating the problem in simple English when I'm stuck lately. Usually going through putting it into words really guides the code. It'll usually look something like:

# the problem is that our query only matches rows where the ID from foo table equals the ID from bar table, but we want rows from foo table that match the first part of our query regardless

This also makes it easy to ask for help, since now you've turned your "it no workie" into a question which you could ask another person on your team or in e.g. IRC for help with. They might then have additional questions, but I've found more often than not that simply getting a few minutes with someone else is enough for them to bring not-your-entrenched-perspective to the problem and hand you the (sometimes super obvious) solution in short order.

TL;DR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging is great