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Technical

Let's Mob Play 7 Billion Humans

Today's (2026-08-25) chat is mob playing 7 Billion Humans. From the publisher's website:

Automate swarms of office workers to solve puzzles inside your very own parallel computer made of people.

...a thrilling followup to the award winning Human Resource Machine. Now with more humans!

I'll share my screen and we can try to solve a couple of the puzzles together. Learn more about the game at:

https://tomorrowcorporation.com/7billionhumans

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

P.S. - The image for this post was created by ChatGPT. I asked it to create an image for this post, which I cut and pasted into the chat, and it produced the below. No other tweaks needed. I'm amazed at how much better image creation has gotten in the past couple of years.

Weekly Dev Chat poster in the style of 7 Billion Humans: cartoon office workers moving binary digit blocks along a conveyor belt, with the text "Let's Mob Play 7 Billion Humans" and event details for August 25, 2026

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.

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