Title before edit: I hate programming, why did i choose this field
TL;DR: Stupid mistake, made by hours waste.
Basically, I was extracting date from the SQL db, and it was not displaying. I tried everything, heck I even went to chatgpt, and copilot. Two and half hours of trying every single thing under the sun, you know what was the issue?
SELECT task, status, id FROM mainWorkSpace WHERE user_id = @user_id
I FUCKING FORGOT TO ADD ‘date’ TO THE DAMN QUERY. TWO AND HALF HOURS. I was like, “Ain’t no way.” as I scrolled up to the query and there it was, a slap in the face, and you know what was the fix?
SELECT task, status, date, id FROM mainWorkSpace WHERE user_id = @user_id
Moral of the story, don’t become a programmer, become a professional cat herder instead.
I don’t consider myself a never nester, but looking at my code now, I extract all the time and rarely go 4 tabs in. It just makes it more easily maintainable. I also like the idea of putting the failure conditions first. I haven’t looked at this yet but I’m sure there are some times I can use it.
Sure, sometimes you might not have a choice, but I do think there is a lot of value to what they are saying. I think it kind of goes in line with standard “functions should do one thing” paradigm.
See, when I was in school, they didn’t teach fail fast and if anything they told you not to. Nowadays, we have moved past that nonsense. I gave it a shot about a year ago, and it has made me a better programmer. I am not going to sit there and count braces, but things are a lot easier when you get the error cases over with and out of the way.
There are always going to be exceptions, but I have personally found a lot of value in using ‘fail fast’, and making more smaller methods that say what they do. I am not always great at that second part, but it is a process. As someone with severe ADHD, it has made it a lot easier to work through problems. Sure, you can end up with more lines of code, but who cares. Compiler should be optimizing most of that shit out anyway.