Stage 4.5: console.log() everything.

console.log("Does it happen here?")

Everyone always skips the last step, but that's where you learn.

"I notice that I am confused, and thus that one of my beliefs is fiction."

How did that ever work, I've been there many times.

I have some Excel VBA scripting that I've been on 1-4 for a while now, so there's a branch off of 4 that should be "fuck it, here's the workaround" or "that part isn't that important anyway, ignore it".

(it's actually not Excel that's the problem, it's the change to its call to IE that throws up a stupid security warning.)

Get enough experience and you just have a brief moment of stage 3 as you dive straight to stage 4.

Unless it's a customer/that-one-guy-at-work (it's a title, but there's usually a handful of them) and then there's this vast stage 0 of back and forth of "are you sure that's happening, run these commands and paste the entire output to me" to be sure of what they are saying then you jump to stage 3/4.

its funny i see this now, after spending 3 hours debugging D:

My boss does 1 <--> 2 with us over most every bug any of us has ever found. Ticking time-bomb...

if (0 === 0) {
var_dump($test); die;
}

As true as true can ever be

Stage 7: Who wrote this?

Stage 8: Ah ok... it was me

One of the best pieces of advice I have ever gotten was to build diagnostics first. The time it takes to do will pay for itself 100X over the course of development.

Has it ever!?