10 - Watch the VSCode Debugger Video #7
Description
Link to the coursework
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/introvideos/debugging
Why are we doing this? We are building a toolkit to help us write great software. In our toolkit we are collecting skills with:
📝 Specifications, like user stories, acceptance criteria, and Given/When/Then Help us understand what to write and check we’ve written the right thing.
🧪 Tests, like unit tests and assertions Help us break down our problems and check our solutions work even when we change things.
🤖Playing computer Helps us reason about code with a mental model.
🦺 Audits, like Lighthouse Help us identify performance and quality improvements we can make to our code.
And now we can add debuggers to our toolkit.
🐛 Debuggers are tools that help us find and fix problems, or bugs, in our JavaScript code. They let us step through our code line-by-line while it runs to see what is happening. This helps us find the place where our mental model of the code is different from our implementation. Your browser has a debugger and so does VSCode.
Key reasons we use debuggers:
- See what’s happening inside functions
- Check if variables have expected values
- Pause execution and step through slowly
- Find exactly where mistakes happen
JavaScript debuggers give control over execution flow to methodically test and fix bugs. Watch the first four minutes of the video and then explore the VSCode Debugger on your machine.