Best Piece of Debugging Advice

The best advice I ever got for debugging came from my grandma.

She never got on the internet. She never wrote a computer program, and to the best of my knowledge never touched a computer. About the closest she ever got was when she’d come visit, the guest bed was about 7 feet away from our home-built computer (dual 5.25”, no hdd, black & white monitor.)

But she did like doing jigsaw puzzles with me. We’d work on puzzles a lot when she was around. One time we were working on a round puzzle of Mount Rushmore. After getting frustrated with my lack of progress, I got up and played something else. I came back a little while later and instantly placed 5 or 6 pieces.

My grandma turned to me and said “Sometimes you have to walk away and come back to see where the pieces fit.”