← Back to posts
There is a moment every developer knows but rarely talks about.
You are explaining your code to someone else, and mid-sentence, you stop. Not because they interrupted you. But because you just heard yourself say something that does not actually make sense. The bug was not in the code. It was in your understanding of it. And your own voice found it before your eyes ever could.
This is not a coincidence. It is how thinking actually works.
When you read your own code, your brain does something sneaky. It fills in the gaps, essentially autocorrecting. It sees what it intended to write rather than what is actually there. But the moment you have to explain it out loud to another human being, that safety net disappears. You cannot fill in gaps you cannot see. And suddenly the gaps become very visible.
I experience this every time I write a blog post.
My whole approach to learning is to build my knowledge around a neutral stimulus I know to associate with, but writing is learning by doing, which builds true critical thinking. I discovered early on that writing about something forces me to confront whether I actually understand it. You cannot explain what you do not know. Your words will betray you before your brain admits it. Every time I sit down to write about a concept I think I understand, I find at least one place where my understanding was softer than I thought.
That is the whole point.
But there is something deeper here that goes beyond just finding bugs.
If you cannot explain your code simply, the code is probably not simple enough. Clarity in explanation and clarity in design are the same thing, wearing different clothes. The best engineers I have read about and learned from share one trait. They can make the complex feel obvious. Not because they dumbed it down, but because they understood it deeply enough to find the elegant version underneath all the complexity.
This is what the Feynman technique is really about. Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists who ever lived, believed that if you could not explain something to a beginner, you did not fully understand it yourself. Simplify your thinking and use analogies if needed. Re-review source material to identify your knowledge gaps.
So the next time you are stuck, do not stare harder at the screen.
Tell someone what your code is supposed to do. Explain it out loud. Listen to yourself carefully. The moment you hesitate is the moment worth paying attention to.
Your voice knows things your eyes have been skipping over for hours.
Let’s Build It Beautifully,
Fab