Hello! On Monday, we released a new zine: The Pocket Guide to Debugging! It has 47 of my favourite strategies for solving your sneakiest bugs.
You can get it for $12 here:
https://wizardzines.com/zines/debugging-guide, or get
an 12-pack of all my zines here.
Here’s the cover:
the table of contents
Here’s the table of contents!
A few people mentioned that they were printing it out, so I made a PDF
poster version if you want to print it:
I love that the table of contents is already kind of useful as a collection of
strategies on its own.
why debugging?
I wrote this zine because debugging is a huge part of how we spend our time as
programmers, but nobody teaches us how to do it! If you’re lucky, you get to
pair program with someone who’s good at debugging and explaining their thought
processes, and they can show you. But not all of us have that person, so we end
up just struggling through it ourselves and learning strategies the hard way.
So I wanted to write a zine where beginners can learn some of these strategies
the easy way, and which more experienced programmers can use as a reference to
get ideas when you’re in the middle of a tricky bug.
it comes with some debugging mysteries!
This zine comes with a few choose-your-own-adventure debugging mysteries (like “The Case of the Connection Timeout”), at https://mysteries.wizardzines.com.
These mysteries show you how to apply some of the tricks in the zine to a
specific kind of bug: computer networking issues! It also demos some of my
favourite networking spy tools – it’ll show you some tips for interpreting
their output.
You can read some notes on designing those puzzes here:
