As a warning to everyone, I am not a developer. I am a network engineer who is trying to do some automation stuff. Some of what I’m doing sounds logical to me, but I would not trust my own opinions for production work. I’m sure you can find a Slack channel or Mastodon instance with people who can tell you how to do things properly.
I use too many print statements to figure out what’s going on. Get an object and print it to screen to make sure it’s right. Do a calculation and print the result. There are so many print statements in my code that I had to start using a debug variable to tell it when to print stuff. I even use that technique in my functions.