[trm42]

Good list. With a paltry experience of 14 years, I would add one silly thing that kind of feels too obvious to even add:

When there's an error or exception, read the error and the stack trace thoroughly and figure out what it means even if it means googling. Lately I've noticed that younger generation doesn't really understand error messages even in the simplest cases and people end up in wild goose chases when the real reason was incorrect permissions or something really mundane.

[plugin-baby]

> Lately I've noticed that younger generation doesn't really understand error messages even in the simplest cases

It was ever thus. I suspect what’s happened is that lately you’ve become the older generation.

[gautamdivgi]

I doubt that. I grew up learning to use a C debugger and interpret core dumps right from my undergraduate school. Knowing the error and inspecting the stack were something I just had to do. In the absence of google and stackoverflow the ability to inspect your core dumps and debug the stack were essential.

[grepfru_it]

Bro I used to provide FreeBSD support on IRC over 20 years ago. People don’t read error messages.

[Tade0]

The error messages, at least in front-end, have gotten worse.

In 2012 I had a stack trace that I could read and eventually figure out what happened.

Nowadays it's async framework method calls upon async framework method calls and that is an improvement in the tooling, because it can now glue them together.

Next-gen frameworks are undoing that mess, but god help you if you use some third party library for e.g. state management.

[bigbillheck]

I like to rag on c++ for having terrible errors, but they're way better than they used to be.

[charcircuit]

I disagree. Stack traces usually only have 2-3 lines of signal. I never read the stack trace thoroughly because it's mostly noise.

[musicale]

Sometimes the error message is spurious and the solution (such as installing the right version of a software package) is well-known. Maybe someone knows this and can solve your problem instantly.

Other times, perhaps frequently, the error message is actually telling you something important.

Many people get stuck in the second case thinking it's the first case.

[lttlrck]

Isn't that covered by this?

> When there's an error or exception, read the error and the stack trace thoroughly and figure out what it means even if it means googling.

The infuriating part is when there is no attempt to parse the error and just fire off a screenshot in chat and expect someone to do the first part too...

[ghufran_syed]

After learning this lesson the hard way, my co-founder and I would refer to this lesson as “RTFE” - Read The F*** Error”

[Scarblac]

And if the error message is really incomprehensible, you missed closing something on the previous line.

[Spooky23]

In their defense the death of manuals and the death of the web/Google makes many error messages a rabbit hole of bullshit.