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Here's a preview from my zine, The Pocket Guide to Debugging! If you want to see more comics like this, sign up for my saturday comics newsletter or browse more comics!

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If you can’t reproduce a bug, sometimes you need to comb through the logs for clues. Some tips:

  • filter out irrelevant lines (for example with grep -v)
  • find 1 failed request and search for that request’s ID to get all the logs for that request
  • build a timeline: copy and paste log lines (and your interpretations!) into a document
  • if you see a suspicious log line, search to make sure it doesn’t also happen during normal operation
  • if there’s a cascade of errors, find the first error that started the problems