Yesterday I tried to diagnose and fix a bug in an open source project. I got discouraged because of a few factors, so I'm noting down a few things I ran into, for future Sumana and other similar folks.

1. Are you editing the right file? If you're in a virtual environment, make extra special sure that the file you're trying to tweak is the same one listed in the traceback.
2. Special characters? For instance, bash might get all weird on you if there's an ampersand (&) in an argument you're passing via the command line.
3. pdb, assertions, and IPython. I'm working in Python, and I've started to learn to use "python -i", the Python debugger, "assert" tests, and the IPython toolkit. IPython especially is cool because the visual presentation of the stack trace is easier to follow.
4. The database setup toolchain is blergh but worth it. If a project needs a MySQL database set up, then fine. There's a little bit of dependency hell but it's not intractable, especially if you have someone nearby who's done it before. What all did I have to do? I can't retrace the order, but from looking at my .bash_history, Synaptic history, and dpkg.log:
   • apt-get install python-dev
   • apt-get install python-mysqldb
   • apt-get install mysql-server
   • apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev
   • apt-get install mysql-common
   • pip install MySQL-python
   • pip install python-MySQLdb (I think?)
   And then, you know, you have to do the initial privilege-setting and connection-making, and probably create a database, blah blah blah. But! Eventually it works and you can alter and create and drop things like it's going out of style. (Which it probably is, memory bank fashion going the way it is.) And it does eventually work, and the stack of dependencies doesn't REALLY take up loads of disk space the way it feels like it will.
5. Branch! Not quite as relevant, but: just get into the habit of proper git hygiene when working on improving a shared codebase, e.g., switch to a new branch for a new logical set of changes. It makes merge requests/pull requests so much more frictionless. And then "git checkout -" makes it super easy to switch between the branch you're on and the last branch you were working on.

Thanks to Joe, Fei, Rupa, Allison, Travis, Moshe, Kat, Julia, and the Bicho developers for their help the past few days!