Chapter 5 - Wait there are bugs?

Picture this: You have a huge field, full of different colored flowers. You take care of the field every day. If you leave the field for one day a few bugs start to pop up. Leave it for another day and a few more start to come. As you stop caring for the field, the number of bugs increase exponentially. This is the same concept with your code, the problems are known as bugs.

My code used to run fine. I mean it was only a max of 100 lines of code. I was overwhelmed by just thinking about fact of writing a lot of lines of code. I soon had to overcome that fear. I took the courage to submit a project of over 100 lines of code for my science fair project. It was a quiz app written in python with multiple subjects and a GUI notepad. It came to about 1138 lines.

When I ran it for the first time. It did not work and I was so confused as to why it did not work. I got so frustrated and almost gave up. I decided to leave the project as it is for a few days. Then came the night before Science Fair, I knew I had no way out and I had to make sure my code works. So there started my journey on debugging my code. I used all sources at my disposal to try and figure out what was wrong with my code.

Then I learnt that I could divide my main problem into different sub-systems. Where each sub-system was easier to solve rather than getting overwhelmed by a large problem that seems so big. Instead we can divide it so that we can tackle each problem separately, and is easier to solve. Doing that made me feel less overwhelmed with the big problem, instead I could focus on the smaller section of the problems, rather than the big problem.

During the night before the fair, I wrote the whole code again. I divided the problem into 3 main sections: The Notepad, The quiz, and The Calculator. I then coded each part separately and made sure that each section worked. I then proceeded to merge all the sections to form a main code which I presented.

That was the way I learnt to tackle bugs in my coding. It was the first time I encountered problems, and learned to face them. Instead of giving up, I took this as a moment to reflect and learn something from it.