Ask HN: How do you get better at debugging/finding a solution?

(personal anecdote) I strongly agree with this. Writing it down is very important. Whenever I trace through a call stack, I tend to construct a visualization of it in my mind (in the form of a DAG + each root starting with the caller, if you will). But I could never hold that image especially when it gets too complex. Forcing myself to write it down helped me a lot - it doesn't matter if it's messy writings or drawings, somehow the _act of writing_ just helped me so much in reconciling concepts and connecting the dots.

unless you didn't even do any changes, and it's a matter of the codebase requiring a specific environment or option to compile and you not having/knowing it

on getting better at debugging, I would try to isolate possible sources of the problem, form a hypothesis, test it experimentally

you'll need to know what you know

is it the environment you have? networking? OS? etc., whatever applies to your system

I think having a known working state is probably the most useful, though it might be difficult to get

something to consider, I do remember there being a paper on getting wrong results even when doing nothing wrong

You can also refer back to your journal to remind yourself how you fixed that similar problem months ago.

Of course, a journal doesn't have to be limited to debugging. It's useful for development too.

I use PHP/Laravel mostly, and while XDEBUG will work with a remote server, it requires an extra extension be installed and activated with a restart of PHP-FPM. That might mean downtime if you only have one app server. After the extension is activated, it requires extra resources to profile each request. Sometimes an order of magnitude more.

Luckily, because it is just PHP, running it locally isn't too hard, but I wanted to outline a scenario where a bunch of people cannot really use a debugger in prod. I've definitely been on teams that have pushed log statements to production to track down issues that were only present in one environment and not reproducible locally. Actually, one just came up about a month ago. Our app server is behind a firewall and a VPN (internal company app) and one of those services isn't properly forwarding the `X-Forwarded-Host` header correctly which caused issues later down the line when the framework was attempting to generate URLs. This caused an issue in our frontend code where some JSON data included bad URLs to the UI. Wasn't reproducible at all locally. Took some logging to find out where in the process the URL was wrongly generated so we could develop a workaround.