How I analyzed and solved an error in my internship project

 After getting approval for my engineering design document, I officially moved into the development phase of my project. I had spent time debugging the existing code, by adding breakpoints, to understand how parameters were passed to different functions for existing features related to my internship project. This debugging helped me get a better understanding of the code structure and the functions that might be relevant for different parts of my project, which has made the start of the development process a bit easier.

I was adding a react-native component that will be the user interface for my project this week. I edited different files that I knew would make the change, but I got an error in the Android emulator when I tried seeing the react-component I implemented. Although the error message in the emulator did not have detailed information, I was able to see the file that specifically caused the error. I attached breakpoints to some functions before and within the erroring function. By stepping into these functions, I noticed that one of the existing react-native components that I was importing into my react-native code was returning an error and hence the entire function call returned an error. I tried walking through a similar debugging process with existing react-native components that use a similar import and I noticed that their imports were recognized yet mine was not. To be sure it was not an error caused by caching, I cleared my cache and restarted my build server. Instead of making the import in other files that I used for my entry point, I tried making the import directly in the code for my entry point and that resolved the import error I had.

Looking back, I wish I spent less time stepping into some function calls that were irrelevant to the error because that made me go down some rabbit holes that with hard code to understand and that was diverting from solving the error. I also wish I reached out to my mentor earlier because after telling her about my error, she suggested different solutions I could have tried and maybe they would have been a lot faster.