Vimeo’s Vaidehi Joshi on the magic of debugging

Demystifying the debugging process.

We software engineers spend a lot of our time debugging. Early on in my career, debugging felt like magic. When I paired with senior engineers or observed a group of my coworkers mob program on an outage together, I watched them in awe. How did they know where to start looking for the problem, much less how to solve it?

Debugging can often feel like an esoteric skill, especially when you’re first starting out as a programmer. But debugging is not magic; there’s a formula to it, and it starts to become more obvious as you do it again, and again, and again. With enough experience, every developer starts to craft their own approach and strategy to debugging — a set of guidelines and a personal process to solving a problem. As I’ve progressed throughout my career and gained more experience, I’ve watched as newer engineers approach debugging with a sense of hesitation and uncertainty, exactly like I did when I was new to programming.

But much like programming itself, debugging is an interactive process that can be learned, practiced, and honed over time. As I’ve mentored early-career engineers and seen them ask the same questions I once had, I found myself on the other side of the table, struggling to teach and articulate the very debugging techniques that I once didn’t even know existed.

I wrote this talk for RubyConf 2021 so that I could better explain what happens in our brains when we debug a problem. My goal was to show that any engineer can become comfortable with the debugging process — magic has nothing to do with it!

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