Tips for Debugging Software like a Detective

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on dev.to

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  • awesome-falsehood

    😱 Falsehoods Programmers Believe in

  • Software engineers can hold a lot of ill-informed assumptions or falsehoods which can lead to subpar handling of "edge cases" like assuming a user's name is permanent or that a name must by X characters or that a name is only structured as first name, middle name, last name when in reality that is not a universal fact. Check out awesome-falsehood if you'd like to learn more about common falsehoods that engineers believe about things like time, names, addresses, and more.

  • vscode-gitlens

    Supercharge Git inside VS Code and unlock untapped knowledge within each repository — Visualize code authorship at a glance via Git blame annotations and CodeLens, seamlessly navigate and explore Git repositories, gain valuable insights via rich visualizations and powerful comparison commands, and so much more

  • Phone a friend. I recommend integrating git blame into your development environment I use the Git lens plugin which shows you, directly within files in a code editor, who authored certain file changes and the PR which can be helpful for quickly getting more context regarding decisions by looking at the associated Pull Request or having the opportunity to connect directly with the committer. Pair programming can be an effective way to debug and share knowledge. Similar, to the magic of figuring out the solution to a bug in the shower or overnight there is a phenomenon called rubber ducky debugging in which just explaining the issue to someone else (even an inanimate rubber duck) can help make the solution more obvious.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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