It is the #1 cause of bugs

🧠 Our brains are heuristic machines. They fill in gaps, make assumptions, and take shortcuts to make quick decisions from incomplete information.

That's an incredible strength: we can build web apps without ever needing to understand how a transistor works.

But it's also a major weakness: most of the time, when a developer writes a faulty line of code, it's because their brain made a wrong assumption - and never tested it.

❌ The problem? The brain took a shortcut that leads straight off a cliff.

This is why defect analysis is so powerful: a bug isn't just something to fix, it's the symptom of a flawed mental model.

And that's also why it's much more valuable to analyze a defect caught early than a year-old production bug. Because when you catch it early, the person who made the false assumption is still around. That's when you can perform the surgical act of replacing a wrong belief with solid knowledge.

🔎 Doing this means challenging what you think you know, and searching for the truth where it actually lives: in the docs, in the source code of the libraries you use, in the logs, in memory.

And when you do it, Just Effing Do It (JEDI). Don't skip steps. Read the message / the docs / the code - top to bottom, left to right. It won't always be sexy, but the answer is usually in there.

So next time you hit a bug, instead of running a bureaucratic post-mortem, ask yourself these two questions:

• What did I think I knew that turned out to be false?
• Where can I find the information that will improve my understanding of the systems I'm working with?