Three Ways to Use Emoji for Faster Debugging

Debugging is one of the most frustrating and painful things a developer will go through. Maybe the debugger isn’t working correctly, or the stack trace is uninformative, or maybe the code base is large and unfamiliar. Regardless of the specific problem, the goal is always the same: figure out the source of the problem and […]

Simulate Network Outages in Your App with Little Snitch

Modern development tools are super-convenient. XCode’s more recent builds let you debug an iOS app over WiFi, so you don’t have to succumb to the indignity of plugging in a Lightning cable (so 2017). React Native’s tooling goes a step farther, giving you the ability to run the native part of the app on a […]

Debugging Strategies You Can Use on Every Project

I’ve wanted to write a post about debugging for a while, but it’s a topic that can be really difficult to discuss in a general way. Approaches to debugging vary wildly and span multiple technologies and domains (hardware vs. software vs. other). Bugs can also exist on all types of scales—everything from users reporting an […]

What Shape is Your Project? – Tackling Software with a High “Complexity to Visibility” Ratio

Debugging a recent project has been surprisingly challenging. It’s a complicated product with multiple components, but that’s nothing new. The customer’s QA department has done great work, but it still feels like this is harder than it should be.

Debugging Techniques: #1 Break the System into Small Pieces

My PC wouldn’t boot, didn’t even make a sound. I traced the problem down to a particular mounting screw, but there was nothing to indicate that this screw was problematic. It was a perfectly fine screw, correctly installed in the right place. How did I figure this out? Debugging!

Debugging ES6 Code in Node.js

I recently decided to use Node.js for my current project, and I also thought it would be a good idea to start off using ES6 (properly known as ECMAScript 2015). ES6 was a major addition to the language, and it was just formalized in June 2015. Since then, there has been a lot of effort […]

Improving Analysis with C# 6 Exception Filters

C# 6 recently added support for exception filters, which enable a few helpful scenarios. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how they can be used to improve debugging and crash dump analysis.

Spying on Your WPF Applications with Snoop

If you’re developing WPF applications and do not have Snoop installed; install it now. I’ll wait. Installed? Good. Snoop is an open source tool for spying and debugging a running WPF application. It can be used to inspect your running application and make changes while your app is still running. I’ve found it to be […]

Debugging with Ember Inspector – Ember’s Chrome Plugin

When creating a single-page site using a technology like Ember or AngularJS, debugging code can become an issue. Firebug and the Chrome debugger quickly lose their power as you have to dig through Ember models and other representations of your application. Thankfully, from the creators of Ember comes a plugin for Chrome debugging — Ember […]

Tools for Debugging Running Ruby Processes

Let’s assume that we have a daemon running on some kind of POSIX system written in Ruby that works great most of the time, but every few months gets “stuck” and needs to be restarted. We might tolerate this failure rate, or we might set up something like monit to automatically restart the daemon when […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

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