The Magic and Science of Debugging (RubyConf 2021)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: it was debugging time. Debugging is an inevitable reality of writing software; every developer has had a piece of code behave unexpectedly at some point or another.

But debugging can feel like magic: Where do you start looking for the bug, and how do you know where to find it?

In this talk, we'll learn what makes debugging hard, and the cognitive process behind it. We'll also explore using the scientific method as a debugging process model in order to help us get better at finding the bugs in our own Ruby programs. Let's become better debuggers together!

Transcript

1. @vaidehijoshi The Science + Magic of Debugging
2. hello
3. it’s been a minute
4. i’m vaidehi!
7. joy of learning
8. debugging
9. magical
10. how do I know what I know?
11. what are we doing when we debug?
12. debugging
13. problem solving
14. 50%
15. an inherent part
16. debugging is hard
17. — Brian Kernighan “Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?”
18. context
19. “combinatorial complexity”
20. mental model
21. approximations
22. what’s happening in our brains?
25. the steps the programmer took
26. bloom’s taxonomy
35. higher order thinking
40. bloom’s taxonomy is how we learn
41. we climb bloom’s taxonomy while debugging
42. when we’re debugging, we’re learning
43. how do we gather our knowledge?
46. End yes no
56. scientific method
59. scientific method bloom’s taxonomy +
60. bloom’s taxonomy
61. to be good debuggers, we need to be good at gathering knowledge
62. scientific method
63. to be good debuggers, we must always check our assumptions
64. approximations
65. assumptions
66. what are we doing when we debug?
68. learning
69. learning applying
70. iterative learning applying
71. everyone can do it
73. make debugging more accessible
74. debugging is not magic!
75. we can all be great debuggers
76. thank you!🪄💛 @vaidehijoshi