Mark Erikson

That way, you can get a summary of what changed, read an explanation of the specifics, and trace the change back to an issue or task in your issue tracker for more information. That helps give a lot of context for why those changes were made in the first place.

This is also a big reason why it's really important to write clear, informative commit messages. Different teams have different conventions, but usually a commit message should reference a task/issue ID, have a short one-line description, and give more details if necessary.

On an entirely different note: Code archeology can be fun! Looking at a file's history can tell you who made changes, when it was changed, and why it was changed in the first place. This is REALLY fun when you inspect a file, and try to remember why YOU made changes to it :)

Indeed! Don't make random changes to the code "hoping they fix the issue". If a bug goes away by itself... that's usually BAD! I get nervous when that happens, because I want to know WHY it happened in the first place so I can know why and how to fix it for good.https://twitter.com/lxcid/status/1010384263252832257 …

I'm reminded that I tweeted about this some before: https://twitter.com/acemarke/status/948036804975955968 … Still true :)

But, log statements and debuggers are both TOOLS to help you understand what's happening in your app. Once you know how the code SHOULD work, and what's happening that's wrong, _then_ you can make intelligent decisions on what to change to hopefully fix the problem.

You should be comfortable with adding log statements, but also using a debugger. Most debuggers work similarly, across different IDEs and languages. You can: - Set breakpoints to pause the code at a line - Step forward and over code - Inspect the contents of variables if paused

Learning to debug an app is a VITAL skill for any dev. The basic principles are common no matter what language or tools you're using: - Observe symptoms - Find relevant code - Trace behavior and data changes - UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEM - Make changes and know WHY they might fix it

(Note that this is literally an if statement and a `console.trace()` call inside the standard middleware signature, so it's not like this is particularly complicated.)

The Redux docs have a shiny new "Configuring Your Store" page! It shows a consistent maintainable approach for setting up middleware, store enhancers, the Redux DevTools Extension, and component/reducer HMR: https://redux.js.org/recipes/configuring-your-store … Thanks to Joe McGrath for contributing this!