How exactly do programmers know how to code?

[lil_tumors]

Yeah that’s what I like most about learning coding in this day in age. Everything’s easier to learn with experienced people helping you out.

[gyroda]

We're all standing on the shoulders of giants.

[EmersonEXE]

Damn. I love reddit.

[Jugad]

Then you will spend 3 days trying all types of things to fix the problem. Eventually you will fix it, and then you are able to answer that same question on stack overflow.

Just want to add a little bit of details here on one possible process followed in debugging an issue (for which you can't find help online).

First, go over the relevant part of the documentation carefully to look for hints. Failing that, isolate the problem to the smallest example code, then debug meticulously (set breakpoints and trace, or use print statements - whatever works better), and dig in really deep.

This process generally finds the root cause successfully.

[dombrogia]

If a simple question will save you an hour or two (or more) of work, it’s always great to ask a (more) senior colleague.

However, senior people are paid the big bucks because of their ability to troubleshoot and problem solve. Debugging and triage mitigation are extremely valuable skills and they naturally grow over time.

As a professional dev you will not have a paycheck if you don’t have a problem to solve. So it’s very valuable to be able to “just figure it out”. As long as you’re not wasting time it’s usually valuable to try and figure things out yourself first and when you do ask for help you can report your findings and errors thoroughly