A first person experience of programming problem solving.

I will describe what problem I faced, and how I was able to find the solution.

The Problem

While working on Javascript kata section, I was doing challenge number 4, which involved making an empty object called "gradebook" and filling it up with properties which had name keys assigned from an array of students. If you dont know what an Array or an Object is, then visit this link article where I explain with examples both of them. Then further, I had to assign a property called 'testScores' to each student property and get it's value from another array called "scores".

So basically, the output that I was supposed to get was this

          
          gradebook = {
                        Joseph: { testScores: [ 80, 70, 70, 100 ]},
                        Susan: { testScores: [ 85, 80, 90, 90 ]},
                        Wiremu: { testScores: [ 75, 70, 80, 75 ]},
                        Elizabeth: { testScores: [ 100, 90, 95, 85 ]}
                      }
          
        

At the end of each challenge, your code is passed through a test. I felt really confident with my solution but I kept failing the test. I tried everything but I could not get the test to pass. So the solution that I got from code was this.

          
          gradebook = {
                        Joseph: { testscores: [ 80, 70, 70, 100 ]},
                        Susan: { testscores: [ 85, 80, 90, 90 ]},
                        Wiremu: { testscores: [ 75, 70, 80, 75 ]},
                        Elizabeth: { testscores: [ 100, 90, 95, 85 ]}
                      }
          
        

Do you see the difference? Exactly my point.

I could'nt understand where my code was going wrong.

The Solution

So I used several methods to try to solve this problem. Firstly, I used console log method to see what exactly was the result of my code. Then I went through the error messages of my test code and had look at what exactly were the requirements of the test. Then I console logged each small component of the code to see if any particular part of the code was wrong. Then I also did some google search and looked through stack overflow to find the solution. Even after all this I could not find the solution. So finally after exhausting all the methods I reached out for help on Dev academy tech support channel.

Turns out, I made a silly mistake of using name key 'testscores' instead of 'testScores' which the test was expecting from me. The solution was right in front of me but I failed to see it.

Conclusion

Writing any code can be very frustrating at times and more often than not, it is some silly spelling mistake or a syntax mistake. The key take-away here is to remain calm and try to cover all your bases. If even then you are not able to find the solution, dont be afraid to ask for help.