Beyond debugging: Systemic enigmas and the art of thread pulling

A Presentation at Claris Engage 2024

Developers have all debugged scripts before. But what about when the problem is elusive and it’s unclear what to debug? In mature, complex systems, the real cause of a problem can be very difficult to find—especially when code that worked for years suddenly breaks, and even worse if the breakage is sporadic.

Problems like these don’t require debugging; they require thoughtful, persistent, intelligent, and creative thread pulling.

Join this session as Eric Clark pulls the thread on a specific case study, from the initial critical symptom to the ultimate root cause. In this session, he’ll walk through the surprising turns taken along the way to identifying the problem. Down the rabbit hole, he’ll explore strategies and approaches for identifying which thresholds in the Hall of Doors are likely to be fruitful, and which are not.

Taking place in the Mayfield Park room.