For programmers, debugging is a frequently encountered task. Most of the time the issue is trivial and the solution easily uncovered. Unfortunately, there are times where a bug’s symptoms are confusing and trick us into evaluating the problem erroneously. As a result, we lose a lot of time investigating and testing.

We’ll explore a bug that took about a solid month of investigation to figure out and resolve. This bug was so simple and its results so sporadic that even with four engineers looking at it, no one knew what was going on. However, with the right techniques, this bug could have been solved in under a week and I’m going to show you how.

As a bonus, I will introduce tools and techniques which will help you with day-to-day development and debugging. These techniques are focused on web development, but can be applicable to most developers.

What you’ll learn:

•  How bugs can mislead investigative efforts

•  How to tackle perplexing bugs

•  Tools and techniques which will help with day-to-day developing and debugging

•  Linters (JSLint/ESLint) — why you should use them

•  Introduction to built-in browser tools