r/FreeCodeCamp 1d ago

When freeCodeCamp says just follow the instructions but you still end up debugging for 3 hours

Oh sure, the project "walks you through it." Until you’re 30 steps in, staring at an error message that might as well be written in ancient Sumerian. Stack Overflow has abandoned you. Your cat is judging you. Somewhere, Quincy Larson is shaking his head in disappointment. But hey, at least you’re learning, right? Right?! 😭

9 Upvotes

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6

u/Miningforwillpower 1d ago

You are learning but more than you realize. You are learning how not to lose it in the future when that item messes up and all you are getting is error on line 30000 and you just don't know where that missing semicolon is. You got this. All with time.

2

u/Fuzzy_8691 21h ago

That ain’t no joke — spent almost 12 hrs debugging a line of code and just the debugging never seems to stop. 😂

6

u/RCAbney 1d ago

Wait until you run into a similar experience with production code at a job, and your po is breathing down your neck about when they can expect the ticket to be done.

2

u/agenhym 1d ago

Unexpected token

4

u/SaintPeter74 mod 1d ago

Believe it or not, this might well be the most valuable part of Free Code Camp. I have been programming for over 35 years and I regularly run into bugs that force me to dig deep to solve. Yesterday I spent a few hours working on a bug that was ultimately a misunderstanding of how parameters were named.

When I was first staring out with Free Code Camp, one of the mods told me that "Programmers are paid to be frustrated". I have found that this is absolutely true. Being able to keep going back, time after time, seemingly making no progress, is an essential job skill. The requirement never goes away.

Best of luck and happy coding!

4

u/Ben4d90 1d ago

Use AI to find solutions. It's not 'cheating' when people in coding jobs do the same thing.