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I would be interested in knowing, for those that do work alone (freelance), how do they troubleshoot issues that seem impossible to overcome? Where do they go to ask for help?

Those of us smart enough to work freelance never have such problems. ;-)

Seriously though, when I come across something like that, I talk to a friend. I know a lot of people far smarter than I am. If I'm stuck, usually one of them can offer some insight sufficient to dig me out of the hole.

What kinds of issues are you thinking of? I have done a decent number of solo projects; the projects where I'm working with a team, when there is an issue that seems impossible it tends to end up with me anyway, and then it's things like "how the #$% can I work around this Oracle bug".

If you're talking about mysterious bugs... you have to have very solid troubleshooting methods. The "change things until it works" or even "google up the solution!" approaches often won't cut it; you have to understand what's happening through the entire process, and be able to narrow down the area of the defect until you know what it is. Even the nasty random ones are just about being methodical, making no assumptions ("am I *sure* what's in this object at this point?"), and knowing your way around the quirks of the particular languages, frameworks, etc..

Also, I say it's not *always* a solution, but many times you can save time and rustle up a few clues by googling for your error messages.

just as note this blog author deletes comments from his blog if he doesn't agree with you. I posted a valid comment Mark. Your use of "ever" is narrow minded.,

@signal9,

I have comment moderation turned on. I only got around to approving the non-spam. You will see your comment posted on the site if you choose to look again.

I will not delete dissenting comments. I only delete spam.

Regards,
Mark

Mark,

my comment showed up originally on your page then it disappeared when I came back roughly (10 minutes later). I take my original comment above back, I honestly was upset that my pretty harmless comment was removed.

Does WordPress give you a preview of the comment you just posted while it's in moderation? I've seen that on other sites. Not sure if that's how it works on mine, but it could explain why you saw your comment but it wasn't there later (different session, I imagine).

Anyway, I encourage debate and argument. I'll never delete non-spam posts (unless they are extremely vulgar or otherwise outside a liberal definition of "acceptable", but dissenting comments are perfectly valid).

Thanks for recasting your vote here.

Mark
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