Wednesday, 9 January 2013

How to Mess up a Patch [Pt. II]

Failures are are a valuable part of the learning process, but no-one likes to repeatedly have failures in public -- the dev mailing list is quite a public place, and being a rookie among so many good coders is quite intimidating.

So it's easy to get stage-fright here and start to feel a little bad about your performance -- it's a totally healthy reaction.

However, don't get bogged down, but always analyze how you arrived at the failure and if in doubt, listen to Zappa:



Finally, remember, your mistakes currently are simple ones.  As you get better, your mistakes will get more sophisticated, and you'll end up thinking fondly of the time when a white space or a simple procedural error was your biggest problem.  So, enjoy this happy time whilst it lasts :)