Skip to content

Every Tuesday at 12pm Mountain Time

weekly-dev- chat logo

A casual weekly virtual chat mostly focused on web and software development.

Weekly Dev Chat is a place to ask questions, hear different viewpoints, and get to know your fellow developers. Every week there is an initial topic posted to get the discussion started. Sometimes we discuss the initial topic the entire chat, and other times the topic changes several times through the natural flow of the conversation.

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.

Debugging in Production: Stories, Strategies, and Tools

Every developer has a war story about finding and fixing a bug in production. Whether it's a race condition that only appears under load, a timezone calculation gone wrong, or a subtle interaction between two services—production bugs teach us the most valuable lessons.

This week, let's talk about debugging in production: the tools, techniques, and mindsets that help us find root causes fast and ship fixes with confidence.

Discussion starters:

  • What's the most interesting production bug you've debugged? What made it tricky to find?
  • What tools have been game-changers for you: logs, distributed tracing, profilers, debuggers, monitoring, or something else?
  • How do you balance moving fast with being careful when something is broken in production?
  • What's a debugging lesson you learned the hard way that changed how you build systems?

Everyone and anyone is welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

Rubber Duck Debugging

You've probably heard of this technique: when you're stuck on a problem, you explain it out loud to an inanimate object (the classic is a rubber duck). The act of explaining often helps you spot the flaw you’ve been missing.

Do you use rubber duck debugging? What other tricks work for you, for example:

  • Walking away and taking a break
  • Switching to a completely different task
  • Sleeping on it
  • Asking the "Five Whys"
  • Whiteboarding or drawing out the problem

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

alt text

What If... You didn't become a software developer?

Think back to that one point in your life that put you on the path to being a software developer and now take an alternative path. Aside from your career how else would your life be different? Would the company(s) you worked for be better, worse, or the same? Would you live somewhere else? Different hobbies? Different friends and/or spouse(s)? What else do you think would be different or the same?

Inspired by me going to visit relatives and wondering how my life would be different if we hadn't moved to Edmonton when I was a kid. Also by the popular Marvel comics and TV show.

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.

P.S. - The featured image was created with ChatGPT where i asked it to create image similar to the Marvel What If? covers.

What if you didn't become a software developer comic cover