Debugging Q&A and Videos

A little context: I joined my company back in Jan and have been doing really well. I’ve been consistently pushing code, owning projects, and creating good relationships with my colleagues.

This week I’ve been really sick and it feels like nothing is going right. I have been running an experiment for a couple months and today I found out that one of the arms is bugged because I introduced it a while ago. After a scrambled meeting with my lead and manager, I addressed the bug and pushed a fix but because of freezes my bug fix won’t actually be in til after year end. My manager stated that they wouldn’t have expect an engineer to not notice a bug like this go on for so long.

The business side is actually not even interested in the bugged arm and would like to go with an approach I proposed earlier in the project.

I’ve learned a lot since I pushed the bugged change and my code and communication has improved but my managers comment plus all the news about layoffs and perfs and PIPs has had my anxiety through the roof the past few weeks. Anyone else feeling the same?

How can I unblock engineers on the team without getting into the weeds and debugging the issue myself or pair programming with them?

Right now, I create work tickets and add context so engineers can easily pick them up. Engineers will then come to me with technical problems as they get blocked on these tickets, which requires a lot of time from me.

Since a week I have been investigating a production bug that last occurred on 20th Sept 2023, and earlier in 2021, but unable to reproduce it in test environment. At times there's a transaction that erroneously overrides some database values, and I need to reproduce a similar transaction to see where in the code the database value is getting overridden. I followed the following steps:

1. Got the request URL from logs for the buggy transaction, to see which UI page is responsible for it.
2. Spoke to the user who performed that transaction if he remembers what he changed on that UI page. It was a POST request and only the URL is logged, not the body. He faintly remembers what he changed. The database history tells me what columns were updated exactly for that transaction, but those columns are not visible on the UI. Those were updated indirectly as part of the page save. But I have not figured out still in what scenario those columns will get updated in the database from the given UI page.
3. Tried performing the same steps in test environment, but unable to reproduce. Tried for different scenarios by changing different fields on the UI, since the user doesn't remember what he changed exactly.
4. Will next be debugging the code on my local system to get an understanding of the flow.

I'm worried - what if I'm not able to reproduce it? I often think that others will doubt my capabilities. Can I be put on PIP for this?

I am currently doing some ETL (extract transform load)

But the Transform part of the operation takes a minute or two. I am having issues with the "load" part of my script where I need to update a DB with the transformed data

Pain point: It takes me a minute or two to get the transform outputs and it really slows down my coding velocity + feedback loop bc most of my time is spent waiting for the code to run

As part of my story or task, often times I have to understand and contribute to other codebases or solve bugs that involve understanding flow of other codebases. What is the best way to navigate this when you are suppose to solve an issue where you have to understand an external codebase in order to contribute or fix an issue?

Code freeze is coming up next week so everyone is scrambling to ship their diffs in right now. However I am facing a hard technical blocker which can be resolved by a coworker on another team, but he’s too busy with his own diffs to help out. I am unable to reproduce or debug this issue myself as it involves some highly technical details about how a proprietary mobile framework (Bloks) interacts and compiles down to the Android native fragments, and I have minimal experience with either. The coworker wrote that specific part of the Bloks framework and no one else seems to understand it (even the Bloks on-call couldn’t figure it out). What can I do at this point?

So, I'm the only frontend developer on a mobile application. My boss is BE and so if I ask for help he just tells me, "im sorry but I have my own things, you need to figure this out". I've expressed concerns when I wasn't happy with that answer; but, he doubled down that I knew more about him than my problem and so couldn't help me.

The issue is, the things I have problems with are exactly specific to frontend, maybe I'm trying to do some data flow stuff and just want to bounce off a coworker. Or, I have to integrate some FE piece to the BE and since we're a 3 person (engineer-wise) startup, we don't have documentation or really anything besides slack messages to explain stuff.

This has led to me being forced to just white knuckle my way through problems. For the past year and a half I've been able to do this; however, I'm now facing more difficult problems, live-streaming, bridging native modules ( I work with RN ).

More recently, I got stuck on a problem where, I seriously contemplated quitting the company because I couldn't figure it out. There is a ton of pressure because we have daily stand up and I can only say, "I'm still working on X due to Y" for so long. And so I thought, what happens when breaking it down, trying to solve a simpler problem, posting online, talking to teammates, reading docs, just doesn't work? I seriously thought everything was spiraling out of control.

I honestly don't know if there is an answer to this problem. But I was truly feeling hopeless just blindly trying to solve an issue by googling, chatgpt, and hoping for the best each time I hit compile.

My bottle neck is debugging when you can't run code. When practicing I am able to run code and add prints and trace the code. But often in a real interview you have to debug through pure reasoning which is hard

My performance is getting hit because in DSA I often get an answer 95% correct but the interviewer tells me I have a bug and I find it really really hard to trace the bug especially in recursion problems

When does being a code machine act as a disadvantage?

I identify as ND (NeuroDivergent) and when I am able to build an app in a day (like hackathon style), fix a bug, solve a problem, the disadvantage I have noticed from time-to-time if I am not highly cognizant of my ability to take breaks (timing my tasks), I forget to eat meals or do basic things (like use the bathroom)? It is much like the stereotype of Poppy Li in Mythic Quest unfortunately. How do we manage this better when there is a value in being productive in output, but an undervaluing of our bodies, and sustainability?

Do we need extra reminders on our Apple Watch (or other Smart Watches), pomodoro technique to be able to tell us to take more breaks even if we are on a roll finishing a ton of code? What strategies have worked well for the code machine archetype to get their work done but without burning themselves out?

These are tremendously tricky to deal with, so what are your best strategies to navigate these pesky bugs?

Under the assumption: it only occurs in the highest level prod environment.

My new manager, my old manager, and the broader team have been managing the on-call rotation for the platform of my company's flagship product, which we launched two years ago. Initially, the rotation included just 3 engineers, but after discussions with my directors and acknowledgment from the rest of the organization, we increased it to 8 engineers to form a healthier on-call rotation.

Despite having 8 engineers, I've noticed that many team members, including our principal and staff engineers, are still not familiar with the on-call procedures. I have compiled a support run-book log documenting the steps for handling each issue/alert, so the on-call team understands the severity and business impact of different issues. The issues can range from low priority to business-critical.

However, the support run-book documentation is not entirely reliable as the ultimate source of truth because our production system support behaves more like triage than a debug system.

Additionally, the nature of the on-call rotation can vary from simply acknowledging alerts and following documented steps to collaborating with business owners. Sometimes, issues are caused by other teams or third-party vendors, making them unsolvable by the on-call engineer alone. I noticed that Production Issue happened almost daily, and the on-call issues have impacts to company's revenues and customer facing experience..

I am interested in learning more about how others view a healthy on-call rotation.

What are the key factors to consider when forming a healthy on-call rotation?

I am a mid-level machine learning engineer in the advertising field, and I often need to provide PMs with performance numbers that are not available in the dashboard so that they can communicate with clients or make business decisions. Sometimes this need is urgent, such as needing to write code to find the number of customers who made purchases in the past seven days that meet a certain condition within half a day to a day.

I have encountered a few problems:

1. The conditions are different each time, and the code is difficult to reuse. I am not sure if it is worth investing time to write unit tests. Is there any way to make sure my code is bug-free?
2. Sometimes the calculated numbers do not seem intuitive, and I am worried about providing wrong numbers, so I spend extra time checking them, but I am also told that it takes so long to calculate such a simple thing. Indeed sometimes the code itself is not difficult to write, but the main time is spent verifying the correctness of the results. How to communicate this?
3. Sometimes I ask my colleagues to help me check my code or results, but I am worried that my manager will think that I cannot complete my work independently and that I am not meeting the company's expectations of a mid-level engineer.