--- title: "What is something you should have learned or understood earlier?" description: "What is something that you recently learned that you wish you would have learned or understood earlier?" date: 2020-01-10 published: true template: blog-post --- Mine is the python debugger. I was a long holdout thinking that print statements were sufficient. That was untill I started having errors crop up in functions that took minutes to run. The thing that I most notably wish I would have known about is post_mortem. ## Example [ins] In [4]: def repeater(msg, repeats=1): ...: "repeats messages {repeats} number of times" ...: print(f'{msg}\n' * repeats) [ins] In [5]: repeater('hi', 3) hi hi hi [ins] In [6]: repeater('hi', 'a') --------------------------------------------------------------------------- TypeError Traceback (most recent call last) in ----> 1 repeater('hi', 'a') in repeater(msg, repeats) 1 def repeater(msg, repeats=1): 2 "repeats messages {repeats} number of times" ----> 3 print(f'{msg}\n' * repeats) 4 # Debug with iPython/Jupyter %debug ## Vanilla Debug import pdb import sys pdb.post_mortem(sys.last_traceback) ## More For more information about the debugger checkout the real python article. [https://realpython.com/python-debugging-pdb/](https://realpython.com/python-debugging-pdb/ "https://realpython.com/python-debugging-pdb/") Also keep a bookmark of the table of pdb commands from the article [https://realpython.com/python-debugging-pdb/#essential-pdb-commands](https://realpython.com/python-debugging-pdb/#essential-pdb-commands "https://realpython.com/python-debugging-pdb/#essential-pdb-commands") # Debug Session [![debug session](https://res.cloudinary.com/practicaldev/image/fetch/s--ShQ3NN06--/c_limit%2Cf_auto%2Cfl_progressive%2Cq_auto%2Cw_880/https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/1tnri6wdwimwk7i83cvg.png)](https://res.cloudinary.com/practicaldev/image/fetch/s--ShQ3NN06--/c_limit%2Cf_auto%2Cfl_progressive%2Cq_auto%2Cw_880/https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/1tnri6wdwimwk7i83cvg.png)