Foojay Podcast #14: Debugging Tools and Skills for Fun and Profit

Let’s talk about debugging and observability. We work with debugging all the time, but how well do we know this common practice? Observability, monitoring, and debugging at scale for your production…

Guests

• A lot of rubber ducks
• Johannes Bechberger
  - JVM and profiler developer
  - Worked on the JDWP protocol and profiling
  - https://github.com/parttimenerd
  - https://twitter.com/parttimen3rd
  - https://mastodon.social/@parttimenerd
  - AsyncGetStackTrace: A better Stack Trace API for the JVM
  - A short primer on Java debugging internals
• Marit van Dijk
  - Developer Advocate at JetBrains
  - https://maritvandijk.com/
  - https://twitter.com/MaritvanDijk77
  - https://mastodon.social/@maritvandijk
• Ties van de Ven
  - Software Engineer @ JDriven, Coach @ Jcore
  - https://www.tiesvandeven.nl/
  - https://twitter.com/ties_ven
  - 6 Steps to help you debug your application

Host

Shai Almog

• Author of “Practical Debugging at Scale”
• https://debugagent.com/
• https://mastodon.social/@debugagent
• https://twitter.com/debugagent

Producer

Frank Delporte

• https://foojay.social/@frankdelporte
• https://twitter.com/frankdelporte

Content

• 00'00 Intro and music
• 00'24 About the topic of this podcast
• 00'58 Introduction of the guests and host
• 05'14 Debugging with IntelliJ IDEA and discoverability of tools
  - YouTube: Debugger playlist
  - YouTube: Profiling tools
  - YouTube: Profiling live stream
• 13'27 JDWP protocol
  - DZone: Remote Debugging Java Applications With JDWP
  - Foojay: PSA: The Risks of Remote JDWP Debugging
  - Foojay: A Short Primer on Java Debugging Internals
• 19'43 Exception breakpoints
  - Foojay: Exception Breakpoint that Doesn’t Suck and a Real Use Case for Method Breakpoints
• 20'34 External debugging tools
  - https://rubberduckdebugging.com/
• 26'55 Observability
  - https://istio.io/latest/about/service-mesh/
  - https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/microservices/what-is-a-service-mesh
  - https://openjdk.org/jeps/435
• 37'58 What information should you look for while debugging
• 45'46 Be aware of tunnel vision while debugging
• 49'33 What to do if you don’t know where to search for the bug
  - https://git-scm.com/docs/git-bisect
  - Foojay: External Debugging Tools 2: git bisect
• 57'05 Outro

Originally published at https://foojay.io on February 20, 2023.