A public second brain

Some ways to get better at debugging

This is the fuzziest category, we all have a lot of strategies and heuristics we pick up along the way for how to debug efficiently. For example:

  • writing a unit test
  • writing a tiny standalone program to reproduce the bug
  • finding a working version of the code and seeing what changed
  • printing out a million things
  • adding extra logging
  • taking a break
  • explaining the bug to a friend and then figuring out what’s wrong halfway through
  • looking through the github issues to see if anything matches

Julia Evans →

Published 17 September 2022, with 92 words.