Skip to content

Technical

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

Other Emerging Tech

Are there other emerging technologies in the computer world that you find interesting? Maybe even other implementations of AI outside of the current mainstream? AI, particularly LLMs, is obviously the hot topic of the day, but what about other innovations that are going on?

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.