Lunch Talk Series: How to Enjoy Debugging in Production

This iteration of the Lunch Talk Series will be covering Karen Tracey’s reliable DjangoCon US talk, “How to Enjoy Debugging in Production”.

You should watch this if:

• You want to learn about maintaining real applications
• You want a less stressful product launch
• You’re interested in making more reliable web apps
• You are looking for ways to prepare for bugs

Karen breaks the talk up into two sections, common reasons for bugs and lessons learned from production bugs. She provides high quality insights on how bugs can happen and how to prepare for them. Specifically her point that during implementation you can tell where things can break. When you find those breakpoints, raise those questions with the product team and design a better failure mode.

After her talk Karen takes a few questions. I loved both the second question and her answer. The question was how do you stay calm during a production bug? The answer shows the experience of years of maintaining production applications. She mentions understanding the impact, relying on others, determining if an immediate mitigation is needed and finally asking what is happening and what could cause this to happen. Just perfect.

For me, my takeaway is that there’s a lot of battle-won knowledge out there for maintaining web applications and I should try to share more of what I’ve learned.