Link tags: debugging

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The Grug Brained Developer

If only all thinkpieces on complexity in software development were written in such an entertaining style! (Although, admittedly, that would get very old very fast.)

A layman’s guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained

In a Land Before Dev Tools | Amber’s Website

A great little history lesson from Amber—ah, Firebug!

Where did the focus go? | Amber’s Website

Amber documents a very handy bit of DOM scripting when it comes to debugging focus management: document.activeElement.

djinn and juice : The Best Debugging Story I’ve Ever Heard

Cassie and I were swapping debugging stories. I shared the case of the 500 mile email with her. She shared this with me.

Phil Nash and Jeremy Keith Save the Safari Video Playback Day

I love this example of paying it forward:

Google AMP - A 70% drop in our conversion rate. - Rockstar Coders

Google hijacking and hosting your AMP pages (in order to pre-render them) is pretty terrible for user experience and security:

I’m trying to establish my company as a legitimate business that can be trusted by a stranger to build software for them. Having google.com reeks of a phishing scam or fly by night operation that couldn’t afford their own domain.

Apart From Code

A good developer…

  • debugs
  • follows the KISS principle (and respects YAGNI)
  • knows how to research
  • works well with others
  • finds good developer tools
  • tests code

Patterns Day 2017: Rachel Andrew on Vimeo

Rachel’s fantastic talk from Patterns Day. There’s a lot of love for Fractal specifically, but there are also some great points about keeping a pattern library in sync with a live site, and treating individual components as reduced test-cases.

A debugging thought process

Remy walks us through his performance debugging routine …and now Una must write him a song.

The Art of Debugging

I was just helping out with some debugging at work and it reminded me of this great talk/post by Remy:

  1. Replicate: see the bug
  2. Isolate: understand the bug
  3. Eliminate: fix the bug

Online regex tester and debugger: JavaScript, Python, PHP, and PCRE

Regular expressions are my kryptonite. I’m rubbish at them and I can never keep the vocabulary in me head.

Mark recommended this tool so I’m going to give it a go the next time I have to resort to regex.

Taking Chrome DevTools outside of the browser. — Kenneth Auchenberg

Kenneth has isolated Chrome’s dev tools into its own app. This is a big step towards this goal:

Why are DevTools still bundled with the browsers? What if clicking “inspect element” simply started an external DevTools app?

With DevTools separated from one specific browser, a natural next step would be making the DevTools app work with other browsers.

Adobe Shadow | preview mobile web - Adobe Labs

Adobe have launched their version of Weinre, the tool that allows you to refresh and debug iOS and Android browser views from your desktop computer.

paulhammond.org: Conditional classnames

Here's a handy little trick from Paul: use conditional comments to add a class to your BODY element, allowing you to target IE without a separate stylesheet.