Introducing Your Don Zimmers

In 1996, Joe Torre became the manager of the New York Yankees. He had coached the Mets, Braves, and Cardinals previously, but had never taken any of those teams to the playoffs. And now, here he is in the Bronx where the annual expectation is a championship.

The combination of the Core Four + Bernie and veterans such as Dwight Gooden, David Cone, Jimmy Key, John Wetteland, Wade Boggs, and Paul O'Neill got Torre to the Fall Classic, but it was folks like Don Zimmer who helped him along the way.

Torre was fortunate enough to have direct access to Popeye's 42 years of baseball experience sitting right next to him. As you code, who can you call on to help you through errors, bugs, and general unfamiliarity?

You may not have a pot-bellied old guy in an Army helmet, but you do have access to resources to help you through.

Chances are, you're not the first programmer to run into the error or bug that you have. Others have probably dealt with a similar issue. Some have even posted their issues and fixes online for the benefit of others. If you copy the feedback from the error and paste it into a Google search bar you'll be surprised how many hits you'll get. Here's what that looks like:



More specifically, if you go to StackOverflow and paste your error feedback into their search bar you'll find a number of hits as well. Will they line up with your issue 100%? Probably not. But it's a start and your issue probably parallels what's already out there to a certain extent. Are the volunteers at StackOverflow happy to hold your hand and walk you through your error? Not always, but info is there. It's up to you what you do with it. Here's what a search and response on StackOverflow looks like.

Another good source of information for iOS and Swift issues is the documentation from Apple themselves.  Are there helpful baseball metaphors to walk you through new concepts? Unfortunately, not. It's still rather terse reading, but it's another good start. Here's a look at some Apple documentation.

The Google searches, StackOverflows, and documentation of the world will answer some of your questions and get you closer to answers in other cases. At the end of the day, no matter what your Zimmers tell you it's up to you as the skipper to make a call and go with it. Unlike losing the World Series, the worst thing that can happen is that your application doesn't run (or has a ginormous security hole!) and that you try again.

As a friend recently posted, "The line between a good developer and great developer boils down to who is better at using Google." There's a lot of truth to that so be ready to dig past the first few Google results and deep into the work other's have done to figure out the solutions to your coding problems.