software engineering 👩‍💻 💯

Don’t underestimate the value of digging into history to investigate some bugs

I’ve always been pretty good at debugging weird issues, with the usual toolkit of println and the debugger. So I never really looked at git much to figure out the history of a bug. But for some bugs it’s crucial.

I recently had an issue with my server where it was leaking... See more

1. People don't listen to me because I'm a good programmer, they listen to me because I'm a good writer. The same is true of pretty much everybody you'll read. This doesn't mean you should automatically reject everything, but it means you should carefully think about it and evaluate how it applies to your situation. And take any argument about "object

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Make debugging easier

There’s so many little tricks I’ve acquired over the years on making software easier to debug. If you don’t make any effort to make debugging easy, you’re going to spend unacceptable amounts of time debugging each issue, as your software gets more and more complex. You’ll be terrified to make changes because even a couple new ... See more

Try to solve bugs one layer deeper

Imagine you have a React component in a dashboard, that deals with a User object retrieved from state, of the currently logged in user. You see a bug report in Sentry, where user was null during render. You could add a quick if (!user) return null . Or you could investigate a bit more, and find that your logout fu... See more