RANT: Read the F'ing logs.

Time to bring up again the distinction in learning styles that the old website The Programmer's Stone brought up. The site was the product of trying to investigate why some programmers were 10 times more productive than others. They pointed to a couple of different learning styles. One style primarily memorized small, discrete "information packets". This style they dubbed "packing" and those who used it "packers". The other style learned by making mental maps of information. This they dubbed "mapping", and those who used it "mappers". Packers can learn fairly quickly, but get lost if things change. Mappers may initially take more time to learn a particular set of information, but once they've got a mental structure for it set up, they can then hoover up new information in that set at an astonishing rate. This is actually more of a spectrum than an either/or, but some people do lean heavily to one side or the other. I've found that people who lean heavily packer often don't understand what it is that mappers do. They know memorization of small, concrete bits of information, and assume that everyone else learns the same way. Those who lean heavily mapper, on the other hand, get annoyed with packers *because* packers don't understand what it is that mappers do. You can see the difference sometimes in their approach to troubleshooting. Mappers try to understand what is going on (because they already have, at some level of detail, understanding of how things are supposed to work) and figure out what the problem is from there. Packers, once they've gotten past any memorized troubleshooting steps, go into a process I've dubbed "Diagnosis By Random Guess" (which is fairly self-explanatory).