Web Dev Meetup

Talk: "Debug Like It's your Job"
Experience Level: Beginner
Speaker: Bob Crowley

Being a developer is not just about writing code - that code has to actually work and figuring out why it doesn't is a different mindset than writing it. Debugging is not a prescribed recipe, it is a necessary skill for any developer. While this ability is inevitably gained through experience, there are tips, tricks and techniques you can learn to level up your effectiveness as a programmer right now.

For the novice, student or new-grad, this session takes you through the most common things you don't know yet.

• how to use breakpoints effectively (there's more to it than you think)
• what the heck step-into, step-over and step-out do
• how to view and manipulate runtime state
• how to use your environment's interactive terminal to interrogate your program
• what the stack is and how it contains a wealth of information
• the importance of Known Good Values (KGVs)
• being a good investigator

This session saves you from all of those stackoverflow.com downvotes and "did you even debug this?" comments. Bring a laptop and play along! Your browser tools are sufficient to try out many of the presented concepts.

Pizza arrives at 6:00, talks start as 6:15.