Go One Level Deeper
When I was in college, I was a teaching assistant in a computer science class. A lot of our job was helping students read errors. “Your program won’t run for no reason? Any errors in the output? No? What about this null pointer exception here? Take a look at that line.” Sometimes putting in a little bit more effort to go another level deeper is all that’s needed to figure out what’s going on.
I’ve tried to keep that in mind throughout my career. When I come across an error, I try to go one level deeper. Page won’t load? Open the dev tools. What does the error message say? Go to that file. Data isn’t coming back the way I expect? Look at the server code. Third-party library doing something unexpected? Dig through their code on GitHub. Don’t understand what someone did in the function? Talk to them. Don’t just read the first StackOverflow result and give up, read a bunch, and then go find blog posts about it.
So that’s my advice, keep going one level deeper, and you’ll learn a lot. Not everyone does this, and it kind of feels like having a super power when you do. Instead of the being the one always pinging others with problems, you’ll be the one who can solve those problems. Over time, you’ll become an expert.