Understand the business cost

- [Instructor] Before we dive into troubleshooting for web development, I wanna talk about troubleshooting in a broader context. When it comes to our lives and our work, there's a cost associated with everything we do. And that cost is paid with some resource, typically, time or money. Here's an example, it takes me about an hour to mow my lawn. And when I mow my lawn, that's one hour that I'm not spending somewhere else. Now as an alternative to me spending that hour, I could pay somebody else, say 35 bucks, to mow my lawn. I have a choice, would I rather keep my time and spend $35, or would I rather spend my one hour and keep my money? The answer to that depends on what I'd do with my one hour if I was paying someone else. So for instance, if I was gonna hang out and watch TV for an hour, then no, it'd be a waste. If I was gonna go work for one hour, well, I'd charge more than $35 an hour, so I could potentially work for one hour, pay someone to mow my lawn, and still come out with more money in my pocket. Now you might be thinking, what does this have to do with troubleshooting? And that's a really good question. Most likely, troubleshooting is gonna cost you time. And depending on the problem, it may cost you a lot of time. As we go through this course, I want you to always keep in mind that there's a business cost associated with troubleshooting. Time you spend troubleshooting is time you're not spending elsewhere on other opportunities. Now don't get me wrong, troubleshooting is part of working with technology, and as a web developer, you're probably gonna do it every day. But there may be times when the cost of troubleshooting outweighs the problem you're trying to solve. For instance, let's say you're writing a bit of code for your website, that takes data from a contact form and sends it into your email marketing software. Somewhere in the process you get hung up troubleshooting a problem, and before you know it, you spent five hours on something that you thought might only take you an hour. Now let's say there was a bit of software available that you could use instead of coding something from scratch, but maybe that costs like, 100 bucks. So what costs more, five hours of your time or $100 for the software? That's an overly cut-and-dried scenario and your work in the real world may not present choices so obviously, but the point is, before you throw a ton of resources at troubleshooting a problem, make sure it's the best use of your, your client's, and your company's time and money.