> Call your shot. Before you run code, predict out loud exactly what will happen.
That's probably my favorite bit of advice. It really helps with understanding how much your assumptions diverge from reality.
That's probably my favorite bit of advice. It really helps with understanding how much your assumptions diverge from reality.
I've often seen beginners struggle because they get so used to the compiler or the (often manual) tests catching errors that they just try things "to see if they work" without understanding what they're trying. But they don't consider two important questions: "what do you want to happen?" and "what do you expect to happen?".
If you can answer both of those, you can figure out whether your code will work before you write it. In many cases when programmers struggle it's because they don't know the answer to one or both. They're left just trying stuff until something works, but there's a lot more things that don't work than things that do, and a lot more bad solutions than good ones.
It's a good way to test assumptions and refine a mental model, and it's also just plain useful for catching boneheaded mistakes as you go. I'm not sure if I'd say I use it as a crutch, but I certainly miss it when I have to use languages like ruby and Python.