Troubleshooting & more
“Programming isn’t about what you know; it’s about what you can figure out.” — Chris Pine
Encountering errors in programming is inevitable and part of the learning process. They provide a learning opportunity and while annoying should not be seen as discouragement to continue. Below are some resources and information on how to get help in debugging any issues. It is always good to try to resolve any issues yourself, however if it takes too much time, do not hesitate to ask for help. Many of the issues have been encountered by others as well and can be resolved in no time!
Getting help
Your question might have been answered in one of the available resources linked below:
- EMOD Troubleshooting
- EMOD How To’s
- Slack help channel
- IDM’s EMOD malaria model documentation
- EMOD Quest resource page
- Online search of error messages (i.e. Google, Stackoverflow)
General Troubleshooting
To troubleshoot an issue or error, it is useful to know about the different types of errors, is something wrong with the code? the system requirements? This blogpost provides a comprehensive overview of the main types of errors in programming.
Tip: whenever asking for help, please provide detailed information about the error message, the script you are trying to run, and what you already tried to resolve the error. Depending on the type of error further details on your system setup and program versions might be needed as well. This will ensure that whoever had the error before can give the best answer in less time.
Useful additional software or plugins
- Git clients
- Helpful Pycharm plugins:
- Rainbow brackets
- Indent Rainbow
- Kite for advanced syntax checking and autocompletion
- R for Pycharm
- Notepad ++ for enhanced text file editing especially useful (much also available for pycharm)
- i.e. json plugin, compare functionality
- JSON introduction at W3Schools (JSON = JavaScript Object Notation)