Mental Models, Programming Fictions, and Wittgenstein

This is a follow-up essay to my previous one about <a href="https://vojtechtuma.medium.com/debuggers-and-empathy-ec7d0a976436" rel="noopener">Empathy and Debuggers</a>, where I confessed to my preference for empathically understanding the code rather than for line-oriented debugging. Here, I would like to expand that slightly mystic notion of empathic understanding with a more exact one of mental models and share a few tips on how I build and update them. <h1>Mental Models for Fixing Bugs</h1> Troubleshooting why an alert has appeared, why tests started to fail after you did a change, why a command is failing for your colleague yet works for you — those are very often solved by one small change at a single place, and the difficulty lies in finding that place and that change. My usual strategy to find it is to consult the mental model I have for the pipeline/code/command in question: <a href="https://medium.com/better-programming/mental-models-programming-fictions-and-wittgenstein-d97f1c849df2">Read More</a>