Love you, man. Thanks very much for replying. Honestly, I thought I have asked a very dumb question with respect to the HN standard, which is why I had not received any replies until yours.
I'm a beginner programmer and a Mathematics Undergrad. I learned C++ and thought of applying it to real-world things. So, I picked a GitHub repo and a "good first issue" and started working on it; I was stuck for a long time.
I think this is a fundamental skill that is talked about very little, and strangely it has not been covered on YT, also couldn't find articles.
But I'll keep trying to learn it. As you said, I'll need to do more practice.
It's definitely not a dumb question - it's something that just wasn't taught at all when I was at University.
My answer, of course, is a bit broad-sweeps. The nitty gritty will depend on the project etc. In your case, if it was flagged as "good first issue" it's probably a relatively small self-contained bug (or the reviewer thought that - they might have been wrong). Well worth seeing if one of the project members can give you a hint.
I wish I could point you to more material but I don't have much at my fingertips. There's a chapter on debugging in "The Practice of Programming" by Rob Pike that I recall being good, but it might be a bit antiquated.
It's worth bearing in mind that there are innumerable different types of bugs and different languages are more or less vulnerable to some of them (e.g. you'll never use-after-free in Java, but you can leak memory just as easily in Java as in C++ - and out-of-memory issues might be a little more likely in a profligate language like Java)
For C++ there are some excellent books by Scott Meyers which, if they've been updated (I was last a C++ dev before 2000) contain a host of little gotchas that can lead to all sorts of weird problems. But hopefully the one you're investigating will be something more straight-forward.
> You are very kind person. Thanks.
It's genuinely a pleasure; I think this is a super-interesting topic. Also I think that debugging is one of the most fun bits of software development - though I know a lot of people would disagree with that!
I'm a beginner programmer and a Mathematics Undergrad. I learned C++ and thought of applying it to real-world things. So, I picked a GitHub repo and a "good first issue" and started working on it; I was stuck for a long time.
I think this is a fundamental skill that is talked about very little, and strangely it has not been covered on YT, also couldn't find articles.
But I'll keep trying to learn it. As you said, I'll need to do more practice.
You are very kind person. Thanks.