This is a list of all the best debugging tips I’ve picked up over the years. Some of these might seem obvious, yet we forget them when it counts. Debugging is a skill. You have to bring every tool you have to the job.

My development environment depends on several processes running. Here’s how I’ve scripted this setup.

Perhaps you’re familiar with this scenario: you’re debugging and stuck. You’ve Googled, read some blog posts and docs. You return to your search engine, type some characters, and then something strange happens: the search engine autocompletes your question, and the results are all purple because they have been visited by you. I’ve come to recognize this moment as always a symptom of a broken mental model.

Action items are small, defined, actionable TODOs to follow up on after the meeting. An example: “close all pull requests opened more than 90 days ago.” Agile retrospectives should produce many of these.

There’s almost always a better variable name or value than ‘foo’. It’s useful as a debugging placeholder, but it almost never belongs in production code, even and especially in automated tests.

I think a great migration database migration is: correct, atomic, reversible, consistent with the style of the application, and (mostly) uncoupled from your application and RDBMS.

When printing a JavaScript value to the console, I suggest using an object literal over the raw value.

Why should someone learn Ruby in 2022? Ruby was my first programming language, and although I’ve drifted elsewhere, I write Ruby every day. Many people in my network are Ruby diehards. As a result, it’s been a long time since I’ve gotten the chance to sell someone on Ruby.

A common React pattern is to pass an object as a prop. Let’s consider the ways this can be used and tradeoffs of each.

A naive implementation is a programming technique that prioritizes imperfect shortcuts for the sake of speed, simplicity, or lack of knowledge.