Debug like a scientist
summary
Debugging method: observe symptoms, write hypotheses, run minimal experiments, publish results. Examples: Cucumber CI failures trace to Puma threading and a race condition confirmed by a simple interleaving script; flaky Docker Compose startups fix when excessive health‑check logging is disabled; recurring production 502s every 30 minutes resolve after removing bootsnap cache that had grown to ~16GB, which made Passenger time out on spawn. Uses Grafana, Passenger logs, Puma, Docker Compose, GraphQL, and incremental tests; fixes are reversible and documented.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction to debugging struggles
- 4:13Why debug like a scientist
- 10:17First debugging case study
- 16:43Debugging in CI environments
- 20:58Production failure mystery
- 32:17Scientific debugging mindset
- 37:24Q&A on team processes
