In this State Changers meeting, the participants focused on troubleshooting issues with conditionals in programming and the handling of webhooks. The main issue addressed was a logical failure that a participant, Michael, was experiencing with stacked conditional statements in his code. Other participants, including Ray, Jared, Yami, and Adam, helped him to debug the problem.
The debugging process involved reviewing the code's conditionals and running tests to see how the program was handling certain input, in this context, a high-risk transaction created. Using an API and a debug table, they were able to see that the program was misidentifying event types under certain conditions. They realized that some conditions contained both a 'return if' and 'return else' statement, making them exhaustive and preventing the program from progressing further. There were practical recommendations to handle this error: one being a suggestion to add additional conditionals for more detailed debugging, and the more substantial strategy to reorganize the conditionals to ensure they're not exhaustive. This will prevent premature termination of the program. Towards the end of the meeting, a participant recognized a pattern error: his program was set to allow everything else to proceed if certain conditions were not met, a practice referred to as a 'waterfall approach'. However, this approach was not being adhered to correctly causing unexpected outputs. This meeting would be particularly useful to developers or programmers working with webhooks and conditionals and working in debugging and troubleshooting. It would be also beneficial for those interested in best practices for handling return statements and applying the waterfall approach to conditional statements correctly.
(Source: Office Hours 7/6/23 )
