Debugging

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. ...

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. ...

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

Bugs are part of software, and so is bug reporting. Reporting well is a necessary skill in an ever-growing number of job titles. In this post, I’d like to explain how to write a perfect bug report. ...

Imagine you’re debugging, and you’re stuck. I have a technique that’s going to help. Think of an action you might take. Predict what will happen when you take that action. Take the action. Check if you were right or wrong, consider that information, and repeat. ...

Some code is broken, and you can’t figure out why. Maybe there are a lot of changes, and identifying the breaking change seems impossible. Or, maybe you’re curious about how things break in your organization. The tool you need is git-bisect. ...

Screenshots of code are common in developer communication, but they come with real drawbacks. Here’s why I try to avoid them. ...

A stumbling block for many people when debugging is reading the stack trace. Today I’d like to discuss this important skill. ...

I remember the first bug that I shipped to production. I was upset that I’d broken something and was anxious to fix it. But I noticed something curious: the calm demeanor of a senior mentor helping me. They refused to meet my intensity. While the world burned, they wanted to instead discuss the bug and its relative importance. ...

You were stuck, and now you aren’t. Congratulations! Before you move on, it’s vital to stop and learn from it. It’s the best way I know to get better and spare your mind for increasingly harder problems. ...