Skip to content

Best Practices

Lessons learned: dealing with failure

In our work, failure is no surprise. Builds break, tests fail, or something happens in production. We've all seen it. The question is, what do you do next? What have you learned from failures you've seen? Do you learn more from others or from your own mistakes?

What habits do you or your team use to learn from these failures? After something breaks, what do you actually change: the code, the tests, the process?

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.

Collapse of Quebec Bridge

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.