I recently finished writing my debugging book and a debugging course. And as a result, I frequently get asked about my favorite debugging features. Debugging is much more than the IDE debugger. In fact, only the first chapter in the book deals with that aspect. But when we think about debugging, tour mind gravitates to the IDE. However, there are still many nooks and crannies to discover inside these amazing tools. The core reason for this is simple — we never learned to debug.

While Kubernetes offers a self-healing deployment platform, there is a fair chance a developer will run into issues that require deeper analysis and debugging to identify configuration problems. Kubernetes supports a loosely coupled, distributed architecture by allowing an application to be broken down into smaller, granular modules—each of which can be written and managed independently.

Remote debugging is fun to play around with. This article describes a method to dynamically change the behavior of a running Node.js process by enabling the remote inspector interface and then use the Chrome debug protocol. On Linux and MacOS, it is possible to send a SIGUSR1 signal to a running Node.js process. The process will open a websocket server listening on local interfaces only.

Integrating with APIs can be challenging. Each with its own documentation format, SDK patterns, and authentication quirks. Once you get the integration up and running, the harder step is testing and debugging any problems. This part can be exploratory—before you finish building—or as part of problem resolution.