How to Enjoy Debugging in Production

As developers, we go to great lengths to try to ensure our code is bug-free: automated code linters, code reviews, unit tests, and quality assurance testing on staging environments before production release. Despite our best efforts though, we still find bugs that only surface after release to production. In this talk, we'll draw on years of experience in supporting production sites to illustrate using real examples:

• Common reasons for bugs appearing in production, including
  • Specifications at odds with reality
  • Differences between development/testing and production environments
• Lessons learned from experience of encountering production bugs:
  • How to guard against "quiet" failures (i.e. things not happening when they should)
  • Methods / services to have in place to make debugging in production easier

With the information presented in this talk, we hope you can approach your next launch day with more anticipation than dread!