OK How do you guys overcome it when you guys "Hit the walls" when coding/programming?

ive been stuck to finding solution for some days,

AND I FEEL STUPID ALL THE TIME

dear seniors, please enlighten me!

I am fairly new to this world aswell, but I find that it sometimes help to step away from the problem.

Like do something else, take a walk, come back and try again.

This apply to all sorts of problems, not just developing.

Just hit your head against the wall until either of them breaks

@electrineer :(((

@lambda123 walking in the sun. Is it possible to learn this power?

You follow it through logically, then if you really hit a wall, you ask. Ain't nothing wrong with saying "hey, I followed this through to this point, I'm not following it beyond that, can someone give me a pointer?"

The only times I'm cross when someone does the above is if they've not bothered to do anything before coming to ask, they've not even tried, I've told them the same answer 10 times before, or it's something they should just bloody know at their grade (senior engineer not understanding what http 404 means for example.)

@AlmondSauce damn this is really really helpfull

@electrineer that's what I have always done. But maybe I have more patience than most as it takes me about 12 hours without breaks to really lose my shit.

What helped me recently is just outputting variable values to the console. Many assumptions were broken and I was able to get clarity on the logical flow of things. And sometimes waiting 12 hours for caches to fully expire is a thing. No matter how many times you force caches to expire through the usual ways, sometimes they just don’t fully clear for reasons only God knows.

i often sit in front of the wall until it crumbles from old age

In addition to what everyone said maybe you should try to rebuild the code from scratch and in a more organized and split way. Then you should find what exactly went wrong and work on it in a sandboxed environment

If you focus too hard on a problem and its subsequent solution then you will only get stuck on a sort of tunnel vision scenario. I suggest reading about focused and diffused mode (related to thinking and problem solving) and adapting techniques consisting of: walk away and don't think too much about it during small breaks.

what!

What? None of you devranters said, that you talk to rubber duck?

On the serious note, I temporarily do some other tasks instead, and come back to it later.

Sometimes it's better to just make it work as simple as possible. You may get a better idea few days later or smth.

Trying to think out of the box also helps. Or questioning yourself if you're over complicating things. Or wondering if you even need what you're doing.

I've found Elon Musk's advice helpful a few times: "Delete the problem if you can".

Rubber ducking I always feel works best for debugging stuff. When youre stuck while building (not even to the debug / error stage), I agree with all the others. In general, don't get addicted to your solution and see if you can tackle the problem from a different angle. You'll slowly get there.