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I mostly run into one of two types of bugs: typing errors (good content, bad formatting) or I'll get to a point in coding where I can't figure out what's going on but what I want to happen isn't happening.

CSS Debugging Questions

• did I spell color with a "u" by accident somewhere? (This one gets non-US english speakers all the time)
• are all my braces } and semicolons ; in the right place?
• is the selector written correctly?
• even if the properties from this rule aren't applying to my element, can I see that the rule itself is finding the right element using browser dev tools?
• If the rule is applying and the properties I want aren't applying, is there another rule that's overriding these properties (and if so, what is ITS selector and where does its stylesheet live in my HTML document relative to where I had previously been adding styles?)

Usually with CSS the problem is that I've been in a rush and typed something incorrectly, incompletely, or that I'm trying to apply styles into a codebase I don't fully know or understand, so I might be unaware of (all of) the rules already applying to the elements I'm trying to style and where those rules are located.

JS Debugging Questions

• did I misplace a bracket ) or brace }?
• if I do alert(), console.log(), or console.dir() on that thing…is it what I think it is?
• if I delete that line and re-type it, is the problem still present (was it a typo I'm not seeing?)
• is it my code failing, or is some feature missing from the browser and my code is OK?
• if I delete or comment out this section, does the rest of the code run (aka: can I isolate the problem)?

JavaScript is harder to debug than CSS since you can do the normal programming things like creating infinite loops and having type errors. I know there are browser tools for debugging JavaScript, but honestly most of the JS I write is the least important JS - it's cosmetic enhancement and extending HTML and CSS, rather than being application code that's doing something important - so usually I can manage to alert() and console.dir() my way through the types of roadblocks I run into as I'm learning!