Debugging Effectively
summary
Claims a practical five-step process — gather info, replicate with 100% certainty, identify culprit, fix and retest, mitigate with tests — and shows tools that actually change outcomes: Xdebug and IDE breakpoints, var_dump/Kint, logging, Blackfire/New Relic profiling, git bisect to find the bad commit, netcat/curl and strace for system issues. Shares a concrete failure: injecting HTML into responses to fix an IE9 backend broke FedEx-generated PDFs, so the fix is replaced permanent solution plus automated tests, not a workaround.
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chapters (29)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:21Colin O'Dell
- 1:08Overview
- 2:15Coding
- 3:44Process is the foundation of effective debugging
- 3:59Gain experience with code and tools
- 4:36Develop your intuition
- 5:34Junior Developers
- 7:45XY Problem
- 15:53Systematic Approach
- 19:33Replicate the Issue
- 20:56Identify the Culprit
- 21:36Fix it & Re-test
- 22:34Mitigate Future Occurrences
- 24:14Recap
- 24:33Long-Term Results
- 26:24Two essential tools
- 27:24Interactive Debugger
- 28:35Techniques
- 30:41Trace forwards
- 33:46Use tools
- 34:04Variable dumps
- 34:59Debug toolbars
- 35:59Console Utility
- 36:34Performance Profiling
- 38:09git bisect
- 41:21netcat
- 44:40Get help
- 49:00Four things to walk away with
