Yesterday, I rolled out a v1.0 release of a Web project I've spent about 6 weeks working on (on and off, that is). I haven't made any exact records of my time, but according to my experiences I would estimate that out of all the time I spent programming, half of it was spent debugging. I estimate that to be about a good 15-20 hours spend debugging, which to me is precious time that could have better been spent writing new code or finishing the project earlier. It also especially doesn't help that I'll be a freshman in college in 5 weeks.

The thing is, I feel bad for spending all that time debugging. All that time spent debugging makes me realize that I made some pretty stupid mistakes while I was developing my project, mistakes that cost me a damn good amount of time to fix.

How can I prevent this from happening in the future? I don't want to spend 50% of my time debugging, I'd rather spend 10% debugging and the rest writing new code. What are some techniques I can try to help me reach this goal?