I like to think of writing code similar to designing puzzles. The more simple the code, the easier to dissect each individual element and know the code with exact precision. However, I have a fondness for diving deep into code I don’t understand. One of my favorite things to do is to find a method on ruby-docs that I know nothing about, and pick it apart piece by piece. Originally, I used mass amounts of puts and tabbing back and forth between my editor and irb. During my first day at the IronYard my Instructor James introduced me to Pry.

Let me say, pry is a dream.

Pry is pretty sweet because I’m able to use pry in place of irb. It also uses a colorized text to help me instantly recognize what the type the presented code is. For me, the most powerful feature of pry is binding.pry. When I’m wanting to find out what a particular piece of code is doing at a specific point in time, I drop binding.pry at that specific line. Then when I run the code, pry automatically opens and I’m given the ability to check specific states of code, even during complicated loops. In addition, I like to use the pry-byebug gem to be able to go line by line, continuously being able to check code and debug/figure out whats going on.

As a Junior Dev I find these practices to be crucial. There are plenty of times I have no idea what I’m doing, and by calmly dissecting the code, I can pull myself through even the hardest bits of code.