A Quick Lesson After A Long Debugging Session (And Almost Pulling My Hair Off)

Source: Dev.to

Background

I originally posted this on my blog after a frustrating debugging session that nearly made me pull my hair out.

Debugging Steps

• Followed my own advice from Street‑Smart Coding:

  1. Isolated the problem
  2. Removed all irrelevant parts
  3. Discussed it with a rubber duck

• Kept seeing the same error message:

  TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'removeChild')

• StackOverflow suggested it was Blazor trying to remove an orphan element, so I stripped everything except the grid and wrapped it in a “. The same mistake persisted.

Resolution

After questioning my career choices and almost removing “Senior” from my title, I asked a coworker for help. They pulled my branch and reproduced the issue, discovering that the problem wasn’t limited to my grid—it affected all grids across the app. The root cause was a bug in the Blazor component we were using for grids.

Takeaway

Sometimes you just need to ask for help earlier. As one of my mentors told the team, “you have nothing to prove. Ask for help.” This lesson is covered in Chapter #2 of Street‑Smart Coding.