Asking for a friend....

New job, fairly new to web development, very new to JS. I am failing miserable at my job can’t complete tickets which are mostly bug fixers created by testers. So I am debugging code that I didn’t write on a tech stack I do not know (ampersand, q, radio, lodash, react, etc)

Do I try to learn the language better?
or
Focus on learning debugging with dev tools and getting better at using the webstorm IDE.

Both, you shouldn't learn a language / tools and not know how to debug it.

The best way to debug react and javascript is by logging. You dont need any tools for that.

Webstorm is good for navigating between files linting and other stuff but its not much help for debugging.

If im wrong by the way id be interested to know other ways.

Use logs from the issue point and work your way back up. Remove stuff to make the components less complex and see if the same behaviour is still observable.

Read react documentation.

The best way to debug JS and react is not to. Go learn Python, C/c++, C#, Go, swift.

Even Java FFS.

I'm kidding btw, but I seriously hate JS.

Often times the power is in the debugger -- trace the program by hand/paper and pencil/mind and then compare it with the debugger at each step. When you're wrong take note and find out why. Like someone said "you do both"

@ManBunMike also get a repl and test out small snippets to make sure they actually do what you want them to do.

Advice I give people who are learning react is to implement any APP they like in TDD.
Be it a YouTube player, a janky social media site etc.

I should say I have been learning the language got half-way through an advanced JS course at a local college but had to drop due to the job (it was not covering the things I needed to learn) Every night/weekend watching videos and coding along. I have bad ADD I can’t learn by reading at all.

To clarify I will continue to learn the language of course but should if I focus on debugging until I get up to speed will I be able to ‘fake it’ until I ‘make it’

Anyone else switched from PHP to JS?

Thank you for the advice and encouragement! Going to spend the day learning the dev tools and built in debuggers in webstorm.